Brian D'Amato

Brian D'Amato Page 30

by In the Courts of the Sun

  That was all. Excuse me? I thought. Tonto did what? And I don’t recognize those letters and numbers either. Huh. I couldn’t tell whether I was disappointed or scared or confused, or what. I just felt like I’d jumped to a standing position after an hour of inversion therapy. Later on Marena told me she’d put her hands on my shoulders because she thought I’d fall over backward, but I didn’t feel them.

  “Wow, congratulations, all,” she said after what I guessed later must have been a long silence.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Jed? You okay?”

  “ Yeah,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s all misspelled.”

  [21]

  They slipped us in silently, very Zen, like eels. I have to admit it was a quality operation, not like the clunky sort of thing a regular military would do. I guess I haven’t said much about the war so far. Maybe it’s because, like all politics in Latin America, it’s just the same old story. Briefly, three days after the Orlando attack, Guatemala had said that the U.S. was now a non-functioning state, that any agreements they’d made under pressure from the U.S. and NATO had to be renegotiated “in regard to the new political landscape,” and had demanded that Belize allow their inspectors full police powers. Why the inspectors were there in the first place is a long story, but basically a lot of Guatemalan criminals/indigenous freedom fighters were now underground in Belize, and the Guates wanted to put some of them on trial. The trouble with this was that Guatemala had always considered Belize to be its twenty-third departamento, and every once in a while they tried to prove it.

  Naturally the Belizeans had said no and jailed the inspectors. The Guatemalans had sent troops to the border. On January 29, a Belizean SSM armed with a vacuum explosive detonated near a Guatemalan village in Petén. The Belize government said the missile had killed five soldiers at a chemical weapons plant. The Guates said it had killed 142 civilians at a school. The Guate parliament had declared a state of war. Of course, a few weeks ago the U.S. would have gotten involved, but now they were battening down the hatches. By the day we’d set for the crossing—Saturday, March 17—the warlet had settled down into so-called “sporadic shelling” near Benque Viejo del Carmen. No big deal. Anyway, it meant that I wasn’t the only person on the crew who didn’t want to cross into Guatemala officially. Maybe if it hadn’t been for me they’d have bluffed/forged/bribed their way through a checkpoint. But instead they’d decided to go old-school and hop the border. They’d be taking the five of us—Marena, Michael, Grgur, Hitch, and me—in first, and then they’d bring the others over tomorrow, by a different route, and we’d meet up outside of San Cristóbal Verapaz.

  We were twenty-five miles south of the Stake, at a small site called Pusilha. Supposedly it had been an important town in the Late Classic period, but it didn’t look like much now. We were sitting on tarpaulins in a Quonset hut that some archaeologists had built years ago. Oh, by we I mean the five of us mojados—illegal immigrants—plus Ana Vergara, who was the same girl-Green Beret type who’d extracted us in the Florida Keys, and her second-in-command, a Boy Commandoish-looking guy named … hmm, wait a second. Maybe we’ll stick with our policy of not bothering to repeat the names of minor accessories to our crimes. We waited for dark. There were two tables, a stack of old screen frames, and a lot of brooms and brushes. Michael stretched his bulk out on a tarpaulin and appeared to go to sleep. Hitch sat and went through his gear. Marena chatted with Ana. Helicopters churred over us, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck, north to south, following the border. Ana’d given me a big Tyvek envelope full of what she called my dead babies, and I was looking through them in the light of my phone. There was a well-worn U.S. passport and a pleasantly plump old trucker’s wallet. The passport was real and undoctored, and belonged to one Martín Cruz, a real person—a travel journalist, in fact—who was now out of sight in Guate City and whose biography and assorted writings I’d spent a half day memorizing. I opened the wallet. It featured two $5K international scratch-off debit cards, an American Express Thulium card, a good Sunshine State driver’s license in Martin Leon’s name but with my new Warren mug shot on it, U.S. $1,155 in twenties and fives, and 2,400 Guatemalan quetzales—which was worth about two hundred dollars, although I don’t understand how they can name such a worthless unit after such a valuable bird—and some well-worn miscellaneous Martín Cruz ID-establishing pocket litter, bills and taxi receipts, and even some bits of lint and scuzz. Finally, there was an international press card from National Geographic magazine. Uh-oh, I thought.

  “Uh, Marena?” I asked.

  “Yeah?” She kneed over and recrossed her legs.

  “Uh, you know, National Geographic’s a CIA front.”

  “Sure, so?” she asked.

  “So, I’ve got this press card here from them.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I just wonder sometimes, what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, who are we really working for?”

  “We’re working only for Lindsay,” she said.

  “And that’s a personal guarantee?”

  “Yes. As far as I know.” There was a pause. “Look, I’m sure he called in some favors at the State Department on this, but, yeah, I can guarantee the spook squad knows nothing. Come on, use your head. If anybody big in D.C. did know about this, they’d close it down.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “they do a lot of weird stuff these days.”

  “This is way too out there for any government agency.”

  “I’m just really, really allergic to those Agency guys, I mean, you know what happened, they’re total thugs—”

  “Fine,” she said, “so fuck it, bail out. Renege.”

  “I’m not bailing out,” I said. “I just want to know if you know for sure, you know—”

  “I don’t know anything for sure, except that you can’t second-guess everything. Anyway, that card’s only in case we get grabbed, and that won’t happen anyway.”

  “No Way’s going to bolt if he sees it.”

  “Well, that’s his—look, you know, he’s your friend, what can I tell you?”

  “Okay, nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “Good.”

  “Except how about we all just don’t mention National Geographic when No Way’s around?”

  “I will personally tell everybody never to speak the name,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  We sat. She’s probably right, I thought. Maybe they know what they’re doing. I’d looked up Executive Solutions—as much as possible—and it seemed like even though they were incorporated in South Africa, most of their work lately was in Latin America, guarding oil rigs and so forth and also, I guessed, troubleshooting for antidrug outfits. On the other hand, they seemed to be a high-end outfit. Maybe Cruz even did write for National Geo sometimes, although I hadn’t noticed it in his file. Anyway, most people who work for them are legitimate. Right? And anyway, my IDs probably really wouldn’t be that important. Michael Weiner had the real goods. They’d shown me the document portfolio he was carrying. It was packed with letters and permits from different Guatemalan administrators, including the home secretary. I’d guessed that some were paid for and some were faked. ES was going to use just one four-person team to get us in. Then, just as a standard precaution, we’d take a little evasive action by going through a festival in San Cristóbal Verapaz. There’d be ES spotters there, looking for anyone who might be following us. We were supposed to spend a few minutes in the square, where the crowd would be thickest, and then walk out of town almost in the opposite direction from the way we came in. After that, once we were out in the bush, there’d be those four with us plus six different spotters watching our perimeter. So that’s at least nineteen people on this detail, I thought. That I know about. Oh, plus No Way, my old homie from Enero 31 who I think I told you about, was the wild card. He’d be meeting us tonight and staying with me the whole time, kind of as my personal bodyguard. I’d insisted on it. That’s twenty. Not exactly a skeleton-staff operation.

  Oh, well. Ca
lmate que te calmo, I thought. Just go with it for now. Accept the energy of the wave.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” Marena said. She moved away, back to her former zone of tarp. Damn.

  She looked good, I thought. I’d been at the Stake the whole time since we’d gotten back from the Saint test, training for what they were calling the Chocula Project, but Marena had just gotten back from three days with Max in Colorado, and she seemed freshened. She had on a little Jungle Jane vest and matching ensemble that turned one’s thoughts to tree-housekeeping with Tantor and Cheeta.

  We listened to the crickets. They had that soothing tone, but it felt like there was something missing from the general soundscape. Marena sighed. Reach out and touch her? No, don’t. She’s mad at you right now. Anyway, let the gal make the first move. If she doesn’t go for it, there’s no hope anyway—

  “Okay, heads up,” Ana said. “Let’s check the communicators.”

  We screwed them into our ears. Supposedly the system was really high-end and it stegonographed its transmissions. That is, if anyone picked up our chatter it would sound like a stock recording of police broadcasts. Only receivers with a copy of our dedicated chip could dig out the real conversation.

  “—hearing me?” Ana Vergara’s voice was saying on the bud.

  “Asuka here, check,” Marena said.

  “Pen-Pen here, sounds good,” I said. Michael and the camera guy said they were here too. Christ, code names. Pendejadas. These people all acted like they were still trying to bump off Castro.

  We left the hut and hiked a mile west toward the Rio Moho. Ana led and I went second. There was just enough of the moon left to see without goggles. The corn stubble and mullions gave way to scrub cedars. I started to get that good feeling you have walking at night, not alone. Even when the situation is a little tense, as it was now, there’s something encouraging about it. The foot track narrowed until it was just a tapir path. Ana looked back at me a couple of times. Finally she stopped, turned, planted her feet, and got right in my face.

  “Mr. DeLanda,” she said. “There are no mines in this area.”

  Her tone sounded like she was about to add something along the lines of “You yellow-bellied faggot.” She was right, though. I’d been looking down at my feet and stepping right where she’d just stepped.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Understood.” Sir, I thought. She faced front again and marched. I picked up the pace. Cerota.

  The path graded down between cecropia trees. Under our feet the ground turned to silt and dead reeds. Ahead of us the Moho was a black void about ten yards across. Ordinarily it was just a brook, but now, with the flooding, it was navigable for a long way upstream. Ana led us along the bank to where there was an eddy in the lee of an ox-bow. I could just see a stocky figure standing knee-deep in the water, and then a local-looking lancha, a wooden flat-bottomed boat, like an old duck skiff. Its stern was up on the bank and a Minn Kota silent electric trolling motor was tilted up on its stern. The six of us climbed in. I half twisted an ankle on one of the big batteries they had lined up in the bottom. Michael got in last and we dipped and rocked like he was going to sink us. The stocky guy pushed us off and jumped in himself over the gunwale. He had night-vision goggles with a heads-up GPS display, the military-standard kind that tell you where you are within a half-inch. He lowered the propeller and motored us upstream, across the phantasmal border. Supposedly there’d been a net stretched across, but somehow the advance people had pulled it aside without setting off the alarm. They must have a few people inside, I thought. I meant on the Guate side. Well, don’t worry about it. A monkey roared up in the hills north of us. It felt odd moving so smoothly in the dark. More aircraft went over, none with lights, and none slowly enough to be looking for us. We fetched up a few times. They grew cardamom around here, and you could smell it. The glow of propane lights rose on the haze ahead of us. It was a village called Balam.

  My earbud beeped. “Heads up, A Team,” Ana’s voice said over the earbuds. “Copy all.”

  “Kozo here, copy,” Michael’s voice said. We all said copy. The boat banked at a distinctive-looking gumbolimbo tree. Two figures scrabbled down the bank to meet us. One of them half hooked the boat with a branch and pointed to where we could step onto roots without sinking in the mud. We staggered up to a footpath and formed up. The ES people seemed to be looking us over with a these-are-the-new-recruits? sort of disdain, but it was probably my imagination. We all nodded at each other. Vergara reindicated the footpath—it looked like it followed the river—and signed “two hours’ march or less” in ASL. We followed.

  We walked two miles across old cornstalks and cover clover. Some kind of small jet rasped low over us, north to south, without any lights, momentarily rippling the water. It’s not looking for us, I told myself. Supposedly they didn’t do much observation from planes anymore. It was all about satellites now, or small drones that you could hardly ever see or hear. On the Guate side they also still used ground-based sonar and heat sensors, but there were so many pigs and deer and things around here that they were basically useless unless a whole army ran across at once. An east breeze came up, with a smell of horses. I remembered walking with my brother when I was little, on a similar night, and being afraid that the flesh droppers—that is, skeleton bandits who put on suits of flesh to disguise themselves during daylight—would come out of the cornrows and sneak up behind us. We hopped another fence and stumbled down a bank to Route 13. You could smell that it had been recently tarred. Vergara made us line up and stand and wait for two minutes. She walked north on the side of the road and signaled for us to follow. We followed. The moon had gone behind the trees, but there was still just enough glow to get around. A truck came up behind us with its dims on, scraping against low pine branches. It was a dark 1980s-vintage Ford Bronco, the preferred transport of discriminating migrant farm workers throughout Latin America. It had a homemade wood cab on the back painted with a Squirt logo. We moved aside. It passed us and paused ten yards ahead. The driver stayed in the cab. An ES person got out of the passenger side and another climbed out of the back. As the second guy’s feet touched the ground I recognized No Way’s silhouette, maybe from his stance or motion or something even more subtle. I almost ran up to him. He’d aged in that way people have of looking older without actually changing in any way you can identify, they just seem a little heavier or slower, like they’re the exact same sculpture but cast out of a different alloy. Maybe it’s just an expression you can’t make when you’re young. Still it was weird, or wild, seeing him again, especially here, and I felt that gush you get when you’re thinking about bursting into tears or whatever you do, but it didn’t seem like the right time.

  “żQué tal, vos?” he asked. He gave me an abrazo. That is, a manly bear hug.

  “ĄCabron! ” I said. “żQué onda, mano?”

  “Sano como un pimpollo,” he said. Literally, “Healthy as a sprout.” He and I did an Enero 31 handshake. “żY que onda, al fin compraste esa Barracuda?”

  “Tengo dos. Podemos competir.”

  “Hey, mucha, callenze!” Ana’s voice said on my bud. Quiet down. “Zolamente ezenciales.” For a second I thought she was lisping because she wanted to speak Castilian style and then I figured out that she was just doing it so the sibilants wouldn’t carry. I held up a one-moment finger to No Way and said, “Thorry, underthtood, Keelorenz,” trying to show that I was talking into my earbud. Just don’t let me intrude on your GI Jane fantasy. Voy aca loca.

  Ana took the shotgun seat. The rest of us, including the two ES guys, piled into the back. It was furnished with a whole lot of empty nylon corn sacks. I introduced No Way all around softly. Everybody said hello but nobody seemed chatty.

  “żPues, vos,” I whispered in No Way’s ear. “żQué piensas de este?”

  “Me da pena, vos,” he said. “żConfías en estos cerotes?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “do you trust anybody?”

  “Confío en que dios se cague en mi,” he said. “I trust God to shit on me.”


  “Es verdad.”

  “Esa Ana, en los noventa trabajó para los embotelladores,” he said. “In the nineties, Ana worked for the bottlers.”

  By “bottlers” he meant “the soft drink company,” which was an old URNG slang term for COLA—that is, Chief of Operations, Latin America, at the U.S. State Department, and also before that, Covert Ops, Latin America, which was the old Bill Casey/John Hull/Oliver North group.

  “Well, look,” I said, “I didn’t want to be here without you, but you should really just take off if something looks wrong.”

  He said no, though, that I’d paid in good faith and he was going to stick around. I reminded him that they’d paid me a lot. He said he was aware of that. I told him about the National Geographic thing. He said it figured.

  “It’s good to see you, though,” I said. “Thanks.”

 

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