Chapter 11
By 22.00 hours all five men had had at least four hours’ sleep. It was not exactly enough, but it would have to do. Far beneath them the pursuit had camped for the night, the distant glow of their fire like a flare in the nightscope.
‘Look on the bright side, lads,’ Anderson said, eliciting groans from Eddie and the Dame. ‘If this was the “Long Drag” over the Beacons you’d be having to contend with rain, snow and sadistic bastards from Training Wing like Joss here. And here we are on a beautiful night, sky full of stars, not too hot, not too cold. Perfect walking weather.’
‘And two sadistic bastards from Training Wing for company,’ Eddie observed.
‘Let’s get started,’ Wynwood said.
The first hour was the worst, as the muscles stiffened by the previous day’s exercise wreaked their revenge. After that it was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. This, they all knew, was exactly what their training had been for, and each man called on those inner reserves he had not known he had before the SAS forced him to find them. It was hard, it hurt, but there was no denying it also brought a deep sense of satisfaction.
It was not a night for talking, and even on their rare rest stops barely a word was exchanged. Each man was too busy inside himself, cajoling himself, getting the best out of himself. The surroundings helped. Walking through this land of lofty peaks, cavernous valleys and endless sky was like walking through a dream, taking each man back to the lost fantasies of childhood, to the roots of his own being.
By the time the first glimmer of dawn appeared over the eastern horizon they were starting their descent into the upper reaches of the Magdalena valley, more than half the journey done. At the foot of a high pass, just below the tree line, they made camp for the day. A mist was rising from the valley below, and for a moment they could all have been in Wales again, waiting for the lorries from Hereford to take them home.
‘Your call to the State Department,’ his secretary informed Alan Holcroft. He grimaced and picked up the receiver.
‘John!’ he said jovially. He had always found that false bonhomie seemed to put Americans at a disadvantage. It was as if one part of them knew it was false, while another part could not bear to believe it.
‘Alan,’ John Stokes, his American opposite number, responded with rather less enthusiasm.
Already Holcroft knew he was going to get nowhere. Not that he particularly wanted to, or thought he deserved to, but the Prime Minister had other ideas. They had used our air bases to attack Libya, and the least they could do was let us use theirs to … well, ‘attack Colombia’ were the words she had used, but Holcroft had presumed this was only a figure of speech, and that her actual intentions did not go beyond extricating the SAS men. It had been pointed out to her that the US were particularly touchy about their relations with Latin America, and had shown it during the Falklands War, but this had only brought forth a history lesson in Anglo-American cooperation, and how the British had been doing most of the cooperating.
The Americans owed us, and she was confident they would make good the debt. At least, she said she was. Presumably she had some fears of an American rebuff, or she would have been on the phone herself, talking direct to the White House.
All this flashed through Holcroft’s mind in an instant, flooding his mind with the usual cynicism. ‘I think we need your help again, John,’ he began. ‘What are the chances?’
‘Not good,’ Stokes said. ‘You know what Estrada said on TV yesterday. If we mount another operation he’ll have to break off relations …’
‘Only if the second operation is also a failure,’ Holcroft interrupted, half masking the accusation in geniality.
‘Could you guarantee your military won’t fuck up any particular operation?’
Holcroft winced inwardly at the language. ‘I think we could guarantee not to make the same mistake twice in a row,’ he said, rather more haughtily than he intended.
‘Yeah, well, your guys are doubtless all supermen. The point is, Alan, we’re not prepared to put our entire Latin America policy at risk for five men. I sympathize, I hope they make it out. But …’
Holcroft heard the mental shrug. ‘There is a second possibility,’ he said. ‘You could simply allow us to use your Panama base facilities to mount the operation ourselves.’
‘Same problem,’ Stokes said succinctly.
‘You got a rather more friendly answer from us when you requested the use of our facilities to attack Libya,’ Holcroft said, as unaggressively as he could manage.
‘NATO facilities,’ Stokes corrected him. ‘English soil, I give you that. But you tell me, Alan, did Gaddafi look on the UK Government as an innocent party because it only supplied the air bases?’
There was no answer to that. ‘Touché,’ Holcroft replied. ‘Well, I tried.’
‘I hope they make it,’ Stokes said again.
The helicopter touched down in the mountain meadow. Chirlo dropped to the ground and walked across to where an impassive-looking Manomi was doing battle with a mango, tugging at the stringy flesh with his irregular teeth, juice glistening on his chin. The ten sicarios he had been leading across the mountains sat and lay in some disarray around him. They all looked like they needed an oxygen tent.
‘Well?’ Chirlo asked, sitting down next to the Indian.
Manomi smiled, and with a simple contemptuous gesture of one hand passed sentence on his fellow-walkers. ‘They will not catch them,’ he added unnecessarily.
‘But you could?’
Manomi shrugged. ‘Probably, but I would not like to bet my life on it. These men can walk.’ He popped the mango stone into his mouth and begun to suck on it.
‘How far ahead are they?’
Manomi manoeuvred the stone into a cheek. ‘Perhaps not so far,’ he said. ‘They will be sleeping now – they only walk by night.’
‘Then why …’ Chirlo started to ask, but the answer was all around him. These men had nothing left. He was tempted to leave them here.
‘If they can keep up the same speed,’ Manomi volunteered, ‘they will be in San Agustin by tomorrow morning.’
This time they slept through most of the daylight hours, each man taking two hours on lookout and eight hours’ sleep. Wynwood could not quite manage the latter, and in the last hour of daylight, prematurely darkened by their position on an eastern slope, he went to find Chris in the lookout position. The bird-watcher had a smile on his face.
‘I saw two of them,’ he said, almost dreamily.
‘Two what?’
‘Andean Condors. They circled the valley up there. Enormous, they were – the wingspan must have been ten feet. Sort of wrinkled-looking heads …’
‘I know how they feel.’
‘And these large silvery patches on the black wings. Incredible,’ he sighed. ‘But they didn’t stay long. I think they must have sensed our presence.’
‘I don’t suppose they see many people up here,’ Wynwood agreed, looking up the pass they had descended that morning. ‘No sign of our friends?’
‘No. Even if they’d started at dawn and matched our pace they’d still be a couple of hours back. But’ – he paused for a moment – ‘I was wondering whether we should do something to slow them down even more.’
‘Booby-trap the path?’
‘Yep. We’re still carrying a Claymore. If they lost their lead man it’d slow them down no end.’
Wynwood looked round, thinking it over. The odds against an innocent passer-by being killed seemed pretty remote. But then they hardly knew anything about the place. Maybe in a year, two years, some hiker would come along and …
‘No,’ he decided. ‘If we were being really pushed, maybe. But I think we can outwalk this bunch.’
Chirlo stood over Ramón as he made the call.
‘Armando, it’s me. We have more information about the gringos. They will probably be in San Agustin tomorrow morning … What does it matter how they got there? They w
alked … This is not a joke … Good. Now you must contact General Castro in Neiva. Tell him there are five gringo criminals on the run from your custody, and you want them apprehended and returned to Popayán. If he is difficult then you can use our name and offer him whichever you think will work better – money or threats. But only if he is difficult … Yes, I understand. I hope you do too, Armando. Chirlo will be handling things in San Agustin personally … Yes, the police chief there is an old friend …’
Ramón replaced the phone. ‘He will do as you asked,’ he told Chirlo.
‘Thank you, patrón. I am sure the murder of his wife has been a great shock to him,’ Chirlo added, not bothering to keep the bitter irony out of his voice.
‘I’m sure,’ Ramón agreed, in a more neutral tone.
Chirlo went back to his own suite, where he restlessly paced the floor for several minutes before allowing himself to sit down with a cigarette. He looked around at all the trimmings of luxury – the fine clothes, the excellent Japanese sound system, TV and VCR, even a couple of expensive paintings he had acquired on a whim in the USA. None of it had ever meant much to him. The fact of it was important, the fact that he had pulled himself up from nothing, from less than nothing – the orphaned boy living wild in the Bogotá sewers who had risen through teenage gangs and worse to become chief hired gun, the sicario jefe, of the Amarales. He was proud that he had not gone under, like so many others he had known.
If he had ever thought about the morality of what he did, it would have been simply to dismiss the question. Almost all the men he had killed would have killed him if they had been quicker or brighter or stronger. He was a soldier in a war, in two wars really – the Amarales against the other drug cartels, and the war of the cartels against the United States.
The first was just a straight dispute between businesses – they all knew what they were doing, all accepted the lack of rules, all played to win. The second was just as straightforward. The people of Peru and Bolivia wanted to sell coca leaves, and a lot of Americans wanted to smoke or snort cocaine. The cartels were just middlemen, turning raw material into product and retailing it at a profit on the open market. If the American Government could use force to keep markets open then so could the cartels.
No, it was not where he was that worried Chirlo, but where he could not go. The post of chief sicario to such a family was the highest a mestizo like himself could hope for. There might be no limit to the wealth he could accumulate, but he could never become one of them. They were Spanish purebloods one and all, each with a beautifully drawn genealogical chart on the living-room wall tracing his descent from the conquistadors.
None of that could be his. All he could have was things, more and more expensive things perhaps, but still things. And his power would always be only that, never true authority. Even as a sixteen-year-old he had seen this emptiness at the heart of his future.
And then he had found Victoria. Now he had lost her, the emptiness seemed so much greater than before.
This time the night’s walk seemed easier, but not because their path led mostly downhill – that merely meant a new set of muscles to torture. It was a few good hours of sleep that had made the difference. After the day-long wait outside Totoro, the night’s excitement and two long marches, all on only four hours of blissful unconsciousness, their energy reserves had been dangerously low. Now, Wynwood thought, they were fully recovered. Eddie had his jaunty step back, Chris had even seen his birds. All was right with the world, or as right as it could be with a drug cartel on your trail.
Shortly before dawn they reached the forested hills overlooking San Agustin. Only a few lights were showing and it was hard to get any real idea of how big the town was.
The five of them gathered in a circle, barely visible to each other in the still-dark forest.
‘The way I see it,’ Wynwood began, ‘we have to choose now between staying soldiers or going back undercover. And it doesn’t seem much of a choice. We can’t fight our way out of this country, so there doesn’t seem any point in trying. We could present ourselves to the local authorities and hope they’re friendly. Or we could go back to being tourists and try and make it to Bogotá, where at least we’ll have people to help us.’
‘Like you say, boss, there’s no choice,’ the Dame agreed.
‘I don’t like the idea of surrendering ourselves to the local military or police,’ Chris said, ‘at least not until we have some idea whose pocket they’re in.’
There were several murmurs of agreement.
‘OK,’ Wynwood said. ‘But if we’re going back undercover we have to ditch most of what we’re carrying. The MP5s can go in our rucksacks, and we can wear the Brownings, but that’s it. The L96 has to go,’ he added, looking at the Dame. ‘It’s earned a decent burial.’
He looked round at them. ‘And it’s goodbye jungle fatigues, hello your sartorial best.’
‘You’re not going to wear that shirt again, are you, boss?’ Eddie asked. ‘There may be fashion police down there.’
It got both lighter and more misty as Wynwood worked his way downhill towards the town. After about a kilometre he came across the first real fence he had seen since Totoro. Since it was high, and stretched into the distance in both directions, Wynwood simply cut his way through it. Climbing a small hill, he found himself suddenly face to face with four figures. For a moment he thought it was a group of men looming out of the mist, but they were statues, man-high stone statues like large chess pieces with flat, playing-card faces. He remembered what Bobbie had told him about San Agustin. He must have broken into the archaeological park.
He continued on his way, more cautiously now, and found some navigational help from the diagrams set up for tourists to follow. Reaching the main gate, he managed to clamber out without attracting any attention from the lighted office off to one side.
From there a road led downhill for a couple of kilometres into the town, eventually becoming a street bound on both sides by houses and bungalow-style hotels. The first real sign of life came from an establishment with the unexpected name of the Brahama Vegetarian Restaurant. Looking in through the doorway, Wynwood could see one European man eating what looked like a pancake.
He went in. The man turned out to be German, and in response to Wynwood’s questions about a quiet hotel suggested the one he was staying at himself. It was only two minutes away. He would show Wynwood after he had finished his breakfast.
Resisting the temptation to waste time by ordering himself a pancake, Wynwood made do with a wonderfully hot cup of coffee.
Outside it was now almost full light, and the sun was breaking through the mist. The German, whose name was Klaus, led him round two corners and into a rapidly disintegrating street. A long, one-storey building carried a sign proclaiming it the Residencias El Cesar.
At first sight it did not seem very prepossessing. The large wooden gates were almost falling off their hinges, and the only visible wall looked like it belonged to a barracks. Inside, though, it was a different matter. Klaus led Wynwood down a short passage, turning right onto a verandah that was at least fifty metres long. On one side doors led into a line of rooms, ten or more of them. On the other a balustrade looked out and down over half an acre of tropical vegetation. Butterflies were dancing in the leaves, two donkeys were rummaging in the earth, and a cock, apparently confused by the mist, was belatedly crowing in the dawn.
The owners occupied the far rooms, and the owner’s wife, a plump woman whose dress would have seemed appropriate in a Bogotá nightclub, was drinking coffee at the end of the verandah. She showed Wynwood two empty rooms with six beds, the shower and toilet. ‘Aguas calientes,’ she said proudly.
Wynwood took the rooms. He could have left the others sitting in the forest while he investigated the situation, but the sooner they came down the better, while the town was still half-asleep. And here in the hotel they would be able to clean themselves up properly – tourists tended not to have their faces covered in dirt.
It took him half an hour to get back to them, this time by a route which skirted round the edge of the archaeological park. Behind him the town was now basking in the early morning sun. Looking back, he could see that it was perched on a sloping plateau above a gorge, surrounded by green hills. Built to the usual Spanish grid pattern, it was about thirty streets long and six streets wide. Most of the buildings seemed to be of two storeys.
Chris was acting lookout on the forest’s edge. The others were half dozing on the forest floor. Wynwood kicked Eddie’s foot. ‘I’ve found you a bath,’ he said.
An hour later a freshly showered Eddie joined the other four in the room Wynwood was nominally sharing with Anderson. As far as they knew, their passage from the forest to the hotel, spaced out in pairs behind Wynwood, had been unobserved by anyone other than children, dogs and the odd chicken.
It was now 0800 hours, and Wynwood did not think they could count on such invisibility for much longer. ‘Andy’s the only one they’ve seen,’ he said, ‘so he stays in the hotel. In the room,’ he added. ‘I’m going to try and call Bogotá from the local telephone office …’
‘Why not from here?’ Eddie asked.
Wynwood looked at him pityingly. ‘Or we could just run a Union Jack up the TV aerial.’
‘Sorry, boss.’
‘Like I said, the local office. Depending on what Bogotá says, I’ll try the bus station – find out when there’s a bus. The rest of you should get out of here, but not together. In ones or twos. And we’ll meet back here at noon. OK?’
They nodded.
‘Anyone got a book I can read while I’m stuck in here?’ Anderson asked.
‘Teach Yourself Plastic Surgery,’ Eddie suggested.
‘South American Birds?’ Chris offered.
Anderson turned to the Dame. ‘Some people are interested in birds, and some are interested in birds, know what I mean?’
‘I’ll bring you back a chicken,’ Eddie promised.
* * *
It was getting warmer out on the street. Wynwood’s description of Klaus’s banana and papaya pancake had made both Eddie and the Dame feel decidedly hungry, and they made straight for the restaurant. It was more crowded now, with both Colombians and tourists. They took a corner table, ordered pancakes and coffee and sat watching the other occupants, one wary eye on the door.
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War Page 21