Chapter 20
They hiked further north-east, Carlos moving soundlessly in front of them. Even in the early morning, now just after seven, the oppressive heat beat down on them. Swarms of mosquitoes attacked Ernesto and Al, but seemed strangely uninterested in Carlos.
Glancing back at the pair, Carlos reached into his soiled blue nylon knapsack and tossed Ernesto a small green aerosol can.
“Backwoods Off. Best mosquito spray money can buy,” Carlos told them. “Get all your skin and also spray your shirt – they’ll bite right through it. And with Malaria and Dengue everywhere around here you really don’t want bites.”
Great, Al thought. Hemorrhagic fever, where his organs would liquefy and he’d turn into a giant, bleeding hemorrhoid.
This just kept getting better.
They were being stalked by parties unknown, whose only imperative seemed to be to slaughter them in whatever way possible; they were trekking through an area more toxic than the Burmese triangle; the place was lousy with insects and critters that would kill you just for practice; and his stomach felt like he’d swallowed molten lava – possibly from the stress, but almost certainly from the rotting gruel he’d eaten last night.
Finished spraying, Ernesto handed Al the aerosol of repellant. It was nearly empty.
Unbelievable.
After another hour of pressing through the undergrowth they arrived at a brown, odiferous river. Carlos moved to a nearby pile of vegetation and lifted some large fronds, revealing an old piragua; a long, narrow rowboat with two plastic jugs of water in it. He offered one to Ernesto and Al, and took a long pull from his own.
“This is Chucunaque river,” Carlos began. “We need to cross it, then we continue on foot. On the other shore it gets much more dangerous, so stay quiet at all times and pay attention to whatever I do or say. I know most of the groups operating in this area, but there are always new ones, and people get killed daily, so there are no guarantees. I have camp a few more miles inland from the river. We should try and make it there by noon.”
“The river stinks,” Al complained.
Carlos nodded. “You don’t want to get in the water, that’s for sure. It has parasites that will drill through your skin and feed on your guts – same in most of the rivers here, so try not to fall in, and leave taking bath until you’re in Colombia,” Carlos advised. He regarded Al skeptically. “Assuming you make it.”
“You sure that thing floats?” Al asked, ignoring his innuendo.
“It did coming over, but you’re the fattest passenger I ever tried to carry, so anything could happen. Try not to capsize it.” Carlos grinned at him, revealing multiple gaps where teeth had once resided.
They were across the river within five minutes, thankfully, with no drama. No alligators leaped snapping at them from the sludgy banks, no water snakes attacked. Still, both Ernesto and Al were glad to be out of the boat – it really did rock precariously and was obviously rotting apart.
Carlos grabbed his water bottle and gestured at Ernesto to do the same. He put his finger to his mouth, reminding them to be silent.
The day got muggier as they moved deeper into the dense jungle. Forty-five minutes past the river it started raining, which was a blessing from a temperature standpoint, but also a curse, as the ground soon became a muddy quagmire. Carlos wore old army boots, but Ernesto and Al both wore tennis shoes, which were ill-suited for the terrain and quickly soaked through with moisture. Carlos didn’t seem to notice or be troubled by the downpour, which stopped as suddenly as it began. Within a few minutes steam rose from the vegetation, making the cloying environment even more unbearable.
How did the locals live in this? Al was dying, and he’d only been in the wilds for a few hours. He couldn’t imagine what August, during the full-fledged rainy season, was like.
Eventually they made it to another clearing. Two burros were tied to a tree trunk, each with a pack on its back. Al noticed that both had rifles conspicuously stuffed in the packs, their dark wooden butts sticking out for easy access. That didn’t portend good things.
Carlos untied the two burros, who ambled about in search of something to nibble. He spoke to Ernesto and Al in a whisper.
“We wait here until the worst heat of day is over, and then make for the mountains. It takes at least two days to make it through to Colombia. I got food and water packed, but only enough for two, so you’ll need to share. Al, I think maybe you could use a few days on a diet, so perhaps this will do you good. But you need to ration your water. Each burro has plastic funnel in the pack – when it rains, open the bottle and put the funnel in, this stretches the water longer.”
“How many times have you done this trip?” Ernesto asked.
“About twenty times. It never gets any easier, but at least it’s not rainy season yet. That’s a nightmare,” Carlos advised.
“Well, at least there’s that,” Al said, and then winced as his stomach gave a sharp stab of pain. “Christ, Ernesto, that poison you fed me at the mercado is killing me. Aren’t you feeling sick?”
“Nah. Never better. Your system is messed up in some way. Maybe it’s alcohol withdrawals?” Ernesto suggested.
Al regarded Carlos. “You wouldn’t happen to have any cold beer, would you, Carlos?” Al tried hopefully.
“Sure. I keep it right next to the slot machines. Just take a right at the hookers and look for fridge,” Carlos responded.
“I figured that was a long shot,” Al lamented. He sighed and pulled out his pack of Marlboros.
“No smoking till you’re in Colombia,” Carlos ordered, shaking his head.
“What? You’re kidding me! No booze and no cigarettes? What is this…hell? You’re the devil and I died last night?”
“Keep your voice down,” Carlos cautioned. “You light cigarette and you might as well crank a stereo and put a bulls-eye on your back. Any dangerous groups in the area will come right to you…and then you’ll know what hell really is.”
“All right,” Al grudgingly conceded, carefully replacing the cigarette into the cardboard package.
Carlos extended a hand, flipping his fingers, signaling for Al to surrender the box.
“Oh, c’mon, Carlos. For Christ’s sake. I’m an adult. If I promise I won’t smoke, I won’t,” Al protested.
“I’m not willing to bet my life on your willpower. The gangs in this region kill people for fun. They kill each other. They kill my people. If you have a moment of weakness, they kill me, too. Sorry. You want to take this trip, you give me cigarettes. No arguments,” Carlos declared. “You can have them back when it’s safe,” Carlos promised.
“Fuck you,” Al said, but he handed Carlos the packet.
Carlos crumpled the box, then cleared a small indentation in the dirt, and threw the package in it, burying it underfoot. He stamped on the dirt for good measure.
“I thought you said I could have them back when it was safe,” Al whined.
“I lied.”
~ ~ ~
On the large flat panel display, Richard studied the GPS tracking data for the cook’s cell phone. They were stationary now, and had been for over an hour. Five and a half miles off the road, but it might as well have been a hundred. There was no way he could get his men close enough to do an intercept, especially since the road would now have cops moving in from every available district.
It wasn’t every Sunday morning that a single Panamanian police officer took down three gunmen in a wide-open shootout, so the rubbernecking factor would be huge. Richard would bet his salary there’d be dozens of officers at the site within the hour, if not more.
In any other area of the world he would have contrived a clandestine drop, landing a chopper nearby and executing a surgical recovery operation. The problem was he didn’t have many local resources to draw upon, and had to keep this particular situation under the radar. Had this been Iraq or Afghanistan he could have arranged for a gunship to fly in and vaporize everything for a quarter mile – problem solve
d. But this was a friendly nation during peace time, a nation which took a really dim view of aggressive behavior – they were still touchy at having been invaded by the U.S. over the Noriega thing.
So he’d have to be creative.
That was fine – he knew how to improvise. He just hated doing so, after decades of experience had drilled into him that the difference between success and failure was planning, which translated into superior execution. He didn’t have such a luxury this time around. And the stakes were too high to leave this open-ended any longer.
The chopper he’d used to fly his team into Darien was operated by a reliable long term Agency asset, so there was no question he could get this guy to do a little side mission. The problem was that as the cook moved further into the Darien area, it would become increasingly dangerous to even fly over it – the rebels in the region packed surface-to-air missiles as well as large caliber machine-guns, and would have no way of knowing that any aircraft overhead wasn’t targeting them. So the window of opportunity was rapidly closing.
He picked up his phone, having weighed all his options and made the difficult decision. It would be messy, but sometimes life was disorganized. That’s the way it was happening on this one.
A pro rolled with it.
And Richard was a consummate pro.
Chapter 21
The sun beat down on the overhead canopy of vegetation, making for a humid and stifling afternoon. No wonder Carlos didn’t want to move until the worst of the noon blaze had faded. Just lying around immobile was difficult enough. There was no cooling breeze in the jungle, no relief from the ever-present blanket of moist heat that enveloped their resting place. Even the brief rainstorms did little to mitigate their discomfort, as within minutes of the cloudbursts ending, the moisture converted into steam from the sun’s blistering rays.
Ernesto dozed, lying against a fallen tree trunk now overrun with vines. Occasionally he swatted at his face, in a losing battle with the gnats and mosquitoes. Carlos stood by the burros, checking the packs and comforting the animals, murmuring in their ears in a native dialect.
Al spent much of the time in the clearing on the periphery, crouched with his pants down, struggling to expel the prior night’s impromptu feast. It felt like someone had rubbed cayenne pepper on his rectum, and was kicking him in the lower stomach every few minutes. He suffered a constant cramping pain, punctuated by brief periods of squirting out what felt like battery acid sprinkled with small chunks of internal organs. What madness had compelled him to sample the local fare? He blamed Ernesto for his predicament. Yes, Ernesto – who was napping like a baby and with no complications whatsoever. For years, Al had only eaten products made in the good old US of A. His culinary patriotism had certainly been reinforced by this episode.
Panama City played host to every imaginable American fast food franchise, so he’d been insulated from indigenous cuisine, other than the local beer and hard liquor, which he seemed to do quite well with.
As Al squatted for the fourth time in two hours, cursing his fate, he wondered how he would get out of the mess he was in. His largest problem was not really knowing what the mess was. Ernesto had turned strangely reluctant to discuss his pursuit by men with guns, other than to restate that they were after him for petty theft. That didn’t sound right – they didn’t send in commandos with ack ack guns over pilfered household goods. But Ernesto was asleep, and Al’s convulsing colon was keeping him fully occupied so they hadn’t had much chance to fully explore the details of Ernesto’s transgressions.
Thank God Carlos had brought a couple of rolls of toilet paper in the burro packs – although if this kept up much longer he might wind up having to use leaves and sticks.
Ernesto came suddenly awake with a hideous scream. Carlos ran over to him, and Al concluded his sojourn in the thicket and also went to investigate. Ernesto was slapping at his wounded leg, howling in agony. Carlos whipped out his can of mosquito repellent and sprayed his wound area, then grabbed one of the water jugs and splashed his leg.
A band of fire ants had been drawn to the bloody gouge, and established a trail to the wound as Ernesto slumbered. The water and spray had done the trick, but not before a series of welts swelled all the way down his leg after the frantic ants had stung him.
Carlos patted his shoulder. “Okay, I know ant stings hurt, but we must get moving now. Your screaming has told everyone nearby where we are. It’s no longer safe here.” Eyes narrowed, he looked around the clearing and canopy. “I hoped we’d get a few more hours of calm before we had to go, but that’s not going to happen. Grab your stuff and let’s go. Ernesto, you can ride on Pablo until the swelling goes down,” Carlos explained, patting the larger of the two burros.
“Where are we headed now? What’s the plan?” Al asked, eyeing the brooding vegetation around them with trepidation.
“We’re going into the Darien Gap,” Carlos told him. “Moving north-east over the mountains until we get across to Colombia. There are a few fishing villages there – Capurgana, Sapzuro, Acandi – we say goodbye at one of these. Which one we make it to depends on condition of the trails on that side…and the weather. From here it’s about thirty-five miles, but it’s some of the toughest miles you will ever see. If we can make it in two days, we’re in race car...” Carlos said.
“Have you ever had any problems going this route?” Ernesto asked.
“I’m not going to lie to you. I know many rebel groups who live in this stretch of jungle, but there are always new narcotrafficantes moving in and killing each other for territory, so power changes hands – some hands I do not know. We should be safe, but best bet is to avoid contact with anyone we see or hear – many will just shoot first and worry about who they shot later,” Carlos warned.
“Nice,” Al muttered.
“That’s if we’re lucky,” Carlos continued. “If we’re unlucky, we could get chopped into meat by any of twenty different drug factions at war in the region, or a fifteen year old with machine-gun could get trigger happy before we get chance to explain who we are, or one of us step on land-mine that the rebels are now setting where it’s easy to walk – which also keeps army troops from mounting offensive against them.”
Well that was lovely, Al concluded. If the snakes and poisonous spiders and whatnot didn’t get them, and they somehow dodged the headhunters and homicidal gangs of armed predators, then a claymore could take them out just as they were within sight of safety. He considered going back the way he’d come, and then dismissed it. He knew there were bad men with guns back there but the difference was he knew they were definitely there looking for them, whereas up ahead there might be bad men, who might or might not want to slaughter them on sight – so moving forward at least offered a slim reed of hope for survival, whereas returning to the road was certain death.
~ ~ ~
Richard located his headset in his briefcase and plugged it into the telephone. “They’re moving,” he reported.
“Copy that. I can see them on our screen,” came the reply. In the background Richard could hear the whump whump whump of the helicopter blades slicing into the sky.
“What do you think?” Richard asked.
“Obviously this would be easier with a stationary target than one moving through heavy undergrowth. It’s almost impossible to see the ground through the trees, so ideally we should wait until they stop again, preferably in a clearing,” the voice advised.
“I concur, but I want this over with today. Do you want to set down, or stay in the air?” Richard asked.
“I think it would be better to return to our last position on the ground and wait until they go stationary again. We run a lot of risks hovering over the jungle, not the least of which is that one of the locals decides to blow us out of the air just for practice. Right now, they’re maybe ten minutes by air from our staging area, so whenever they stop to take a break, we can be on them.” He paused. “That’s how I’d prefer to play it.”
“All right.
Land. But be ready to move at a moment’s notice,” Richard ordered. “I’ll stay on the com channel. Hopefully they’ll stop again within an hour or two, and that’s when we’ll make our move.”
“I just wish we had a more elegant solution than we do. A couple of rockets with no back-blast would solve this pretty quickly,” the voice observed.
“I know, but the AT-4s we can get around here are too dangerous. The back-blast would fry the inside of the chopper, taking you with it,” Richard reminded.
“So we move to plan B. Less elegant, but just as effective. Hopefully.”
~ ~ ~
The scene back at the highway epitomized pandemonium – police vehicles from every outpost within forty miles had raced to the site of the shootout. Groups of officers stood idly chatting with one another while a flatbed tow truck struggled to drag the scorched SUV chassis off the road.
Sergio was the closest thing to a celebrity the police force would have for some time to come. ‘Lone cop takes down an armed load of killers’ would make for a compelling legend – even if there were some holes in his accounting of the incident.
All anyone had to do was look at his police cruiser, riddled with bullet holes, to get an idea of what he’d survived. According to Sergio’s story he’d pulled over to take a leak and the vehicle had sped by headed north, and then backed down the road towards him and started shooting. The tire marks corroborated his version of events, so there were no questions – other than where he’d gotten the AK – which he truthfully admitted having not yet signed into custody following a drug bust the prior week. Against protocol, of course, but given his heroic actions the brass would likely overlook it.
The Geronimo Breach Page 13