by Donn Taylor
Sledge stopped and whispered more instructions. A guard post lay ahead at the edge of the strip. He led Kristin deeper into the woods to detour around it. By this time she’d lost her sense of direction and depended solely on him for navigation. Presently, he made a sharp right turn and advanced even more cautiously. Soon they came again to the wood line. As before, they crawled under a bush to observe.
The aircraft Sledge called a C-47 rested directly across the strip, a scant hundred yards away. Behind it, nearer the tree line, sat a small twin-engine aircraft they hadn’t seen before. Uniformed guerrillas were loading the C-47 with crates from a nearby truck. The men in street clothes talked with two in uniform near the larger aircraft.
From this vantage point, Kristin saw that the building among the trees was a prefab the size of a small warehouse. Built above it was an extraordinary flat-roofed metal superstructure supported by iron girders along each side. A tangle of vines hung over one corner of the roof, and Kristin could make out a few shrubs on top.
Quite a project, she thought. The superstructure must have been built to block aerial observation of the building. Observation by sensors, too. She’d heard that conventional camouflage was useless against modern cameras and infrared. But a false roof topped with real vegetation would fool both. Kristin’s story grew bigger by the minute.
“Why would they go to all that trouble to hide the building when they can’t hide the airstrip,” Kristin asked.
“Colombia has airstrips like dogs have ticks,” Sledge said. “They serve plantations, drug cartels, whatever.” He handed her the binoculars. “Look through these and tell me what you see.”
She sensed a deep anger smoldering inside him, well-contained but revealed in the hardness of his eyes. This time it wasn’t directed at her. She fumbled with the binoculars, so he showed her how to adjust their width and focus for her eyes. When she got it right, the figures across the airstrip appeared startlingly close
“Tell me what you see,” he whispered.
“Beside the airplane,” she whispered back, “a man in a flight suit leaning against the landing gear and smoking. Another pilot looks like he’s supervising the loading.” She trained the binoculars on the building. “Those are real bushes on that false roof over the building. The building itself looks like an ordinary prefab.”
“Good so far. What about the people?” Sledge’s face had reddened beneath the streaks of camouflage. He seemed furious, yet he kept his voice gentle.
“I see guerrillas loading the airplane,” she whispered. “A mixed group of men quarreling about something…Wait!” Her heart hammered her ribs. “Sledge, the guerrilla quarreling with them is Diego Contreras. The one standing beside him is his deputy. The deputy has something in his hand, showing it to the others. It looks like some kind of…uh…artillery shell?”
“I can see it without binoculars,” Sledge said. “See those fins on the tail end of it? It’s a mortar shell. About eighty-one or eighty-two millimeter.”
“What would that be doing here?”
Sledge made no answer but asked, “What can you tell about the men wearing civvies?”
Why hadn’t she noticed before? “I don’t think they’re Colombians. They look more like Northern Europeans. The two big ones—giants, really—are as blond as I am. The two dark ones standing in the background could be anything.”
“Bodyguards wearing shoulder holsters,” Sledge put in. “Notice how they keep their hands close to their chests? And how they keep watching the two guerrillas?”
Kristin studied the group again. “Yes, and the other man in civvies…the one with black hair. He’s the one in charge because he and Contreras are doing all the talking.”
“What’s being loaded in the aircraft?”
She shifted the binoculars. “Sealed crates of some kind, shaped like coffins but much smaller. They’re heavy. It takes two men to carry them, and they strain to lift them into the airplane.”
Sledge gave a whispered attempt at a laugh. “You’re a good observer. They taught you well in journalism school.” Kristin felt an illogical burst of pride at his compliment. But then he asked, “Now how good is your reasoning? What do you think we’re witnessing?”
She lowered the binoculars and looked into his face. It showed a grim smile through the caked mud of its camouflage. She suddenly realized how ridiculous she must look with dirt smeared all over her face.
But what were they witnessing?
“Whatever the stuff is, it’s going out, not coming in. Some kind of smuggling. Not drugs, because the boxes are too heavy. The building has to be a processing plant or factory. The weight of those crates…That mortar shell…”
She gasped as the pieces coalesced into a coherent picture. “Sledge, could that be a munitions factory hidden right here in the Colombian boondocks?”
The idea made no sense, yet she couldn’t escape the sum of her observations.
Sledge nodded. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? But it’s the only explanation I can come up with. That’s why I wanted you to work it out for yourself.” His eyes hardened again. “Now look beyond the group of men. What do you see next to the building?”
She looked through the binoculars again. “The two men lounging by the door, smoking. Those aren’t guerilla uniforms. They look like something a fireman would wear into a fire.”
“Do they still have something in their hands?”
“Yes, some kind of…Gas masks? Chemical suits?” Her heart beat faster. “Sledge, could that cargo be chemical munitions? Could that building...?”
Ideas and images whirled chaotically in her mind. The ghastly spectacle of the bodies—the fatal clearing convenient to this location yet far enough away for a macabre experiment—the village women’s statement that guerrillas, not paramilitaries, had committed the massacre. The images formed a picture too horrible to contemplate.
Her own anger flamed up to match Sledge’s silent fury. “The second massacre. Some kind of chemicals.” Her voice came out as a hiss. “Diego Contreras did that. Now he’s sending chemicals out to murder more innocent people.”
Her anger exploded into judgment. “Contreras deserves to die. He’s a mass murderer. You have a rifle, Sledge. Kill him. Kill Diego Contreras.”
Sledge rolled onto his stomach, elbows supporting the upper body as his hands tucked the rifle butt against his shoulder. Kristin had never seen eyes so hard—not even in Diego Contreras. Deliberately, Sledge’s right hand eased back the bolt and quietly seated a round into the chamber. Just as deliberately, he adjusted the weapon on his shoulder and took careful aim. The weapon steadied, and she knew he had the target in his sights. He took a deep breath and held it.
Why is he taking so long?
“What are you waiting for, Sledge?” Even in a whisper she heard the fury in her voice. “Kill him, Sledge. Kill him.”
The rifle held steady, then wavered. Sledge’s breath came out as a sigh. The rifle butt dropped from his shoulder and rested on the ground.
Kristin’s anger with Contreras transferred itself onto Sledge. “What are you afraid of?” Only fear of his strength kept her from pounding him with her fists. “Why don’t you kill him?”
His eyes and voice softened. “I don’t know, brat. I don’t know.”
She renewed her attack. “You weren’t so finicky about killing my guards. Have you lost your nerve?”
“That may be.” His eyes grew sad. “There’s good reason why I shouldn’t kill Contreras, but I don’t know if that’s why I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Killing him won’t destroy the factory or stop that operation—whatever it is. Those are the important things. We can’t do them ourselves, so we have to get back alive and tell what we’ve seen. We have to put your pictures in the right hands.”
His common sense forced her anger into reluctant retreat. It also called her motive into question. Was it righteous outrage over the massacre? Or was it more personal—revenge
on Contreras for kidnapping her?
She took a deep breath. “I—I guess you’re right. Let’s get started.”
“Not just yet. You asked why, and I’m going to tell you as nearly as I understand it myself.”
She had never seen him so serious.
“I have personal reasons for wanting Contreras dead. He ordered the murder of some people very dear to me. I was with them at the time and got shot up pretty badly. I lost eight months of my life in recovery.”
“Raúl told us something about it.”
“On top of that, your fa—I mean, Steve Spinner— offered me a hundred thousand extra to kill Contreras during the rescue.”
Kristin’s hand flew to her mouth. “But everyone knows he’s a pacifist.”
“He’s a pacifist in public. Privately, he’s quite ruthless. He didn’t like Contreras’s double-crossing him after he paid your ransom.”
Kristin remembered what Contreras said during her interrogation. He and Spinner had worked together in Nicaragua…against U.S. interests. She’d even risked a question about it but dropped it when Contreras grew threatening.
“I don’t know why I didn’t kill Contreras,” Sledge said. “I’d like to think it was because we need to wipe out his entire operation. But maybe I just didn’t want to be a revenge killer or a paid assassin. I’ll wonder about that for years.”
She hadn’t thought him capable of such introspection. Her anger fled before it, leaving her weak and drained. “I—I think I understand. Now maybe we ought to go back.”
Retracing their former route, they arrived at the end of the airstrip without incident. In the emptiness that followed Kristin’s emotional storm, she felt as if nothing were real, that all she’d seen had happened in a half-remembered nightmare. Yet her mind kept hammering home the reality of every detail.
When they reached the clearing where she’d found the bodies, she heard the cough and sputter of aircraft engines coming to life. Then came the sounds of taxiing and engines being run up before takeoff. Sledge led her again under the trees.
“I know,” she said, “I’m not supposed to look up until it’s past.”
Sledge chuckled, an odd mixture of tension and amusement. “You learn fast, brat. You should have been a soldier instead of a journalist.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “In some cases there doesn’t seem to be much difference.”
The din of the aircraft passed overhead and receded. At Sledge’s signal, they ran into the clearing and watched it depart—to the west at first, and then with a slow climbing turn, to the north.
“I’d like to know where he’s heading,” Sledge said. “A lot of places are north of here—the entire Caribbean and most of the Southern states. Beyond them if he refuels.”
Kristin shuddered. “Even thinking about chemical weapons smuggled into the United States gives me the shivers.”
“They can’t do it by air. In the old days when all the radar was ground-based, they flew in under it. But now we have airborne radar that looks downward. They can’t fly under that without a shovel.”
Kristin wrinkled her nose. “Not very practical, I’d think.”
Sledge answered with another chuckle. “You never know what those engineers will do next.” A frown shadowed his face. “We’d better get moving. Ramón will be worried, and the guerrillas may make trouble if they see a helicopter sitting near the village.”
They found Ramón and Elena waiting by the helicopter. The village women had gone about their business, and the Jeep was nowhere in sight.
“We feared you were lostlings,” Ramón said, “but now you have become foundlings.”
“We found more than we bargained for,” Sledge said. “Let’s get out of here fast.”
Kristin flinched as Ramón pounded his chest and emitted a Tarzan-like, bellowing roar.
Elena explained, unnecessarily, “My husband likes the movies.”
At Ramón’s signal, the two outguards came running, and the pilot started the helicopter’s engine. The ancient Jeep had apparently become expendable, a small price to pay for getting everyone out alive. With the headcount complete and everyone on board, the chopper lifted off. A wave of relief came over Kristin as it leveled out on course for Bogotá.
Sobering thoughts soon followed. She’d taken a tremendous risk and somehow gotten by with it. The memory card on which she’d staked her career and her life lay safely in her bosom. She had her blockbuster story, plus several more for good measure. She’d interviewed witnesses who said that guerrillas, not paramilitaries, were responsible for the original massacre. She and Sledge had seen more evidence linking Diego Contreras and his men to the second massacre and an as-yet-unknown plot beyond it. All she had to do now was print the pictures and write the stories.
But a strange foreboding persisted, hard and heavy as a brick inside her stomach. Her blind fury in wishing Contreras’s death revealed a new, unpleasant facet of her character. And a sinister voice within whispered that her acquaintance with danger was not finished—that the road ahead might hold more peril than the one that lay behind.
15
When Kristin retired to her bedroom at the hacienda, she was appalled by the apparition she saw in the mirror. The lipstick dots and streaks of dried mud on her face made her look like a fugitive from a horror movie. In her bath, she spent extra time washing her hair. She went down to supper wearing the same pastel skirt and sweater she’d worn the night before. Sledge was already there, dressed in slacks and an open-collared shirt. When he was cleaned up, he didn’t look too bad. She needed his knowledge and protection, but his presence brought with it an almost physical pressure that made her bridle.
After supper, the entire group drove to Ramón’s office in a well-armed convoy. The guards waited outside while Ramón and Elena took Kristin and Sledge upstairs. Ramón showed Kristin five digital cameras, and she chose one of the same make as hers. When the memory card fit, Ramón led her to a computer with twenty-two -inch color monitor. Kristin clicked the mouse a couple of times, and a picture of a stunningly beautiful blue and yellow bird appeared on the screen.
Elena sighed. “It’s beautiful.”
Kristin ignored her and asked, “Can you do thumbnails?”
“Sí,” Ramón said. He pressed a few keys and thumbnails of the photos appeared. He stepped back and motioned Kristin forward.
She took the mouse, scrolled down to the end of the roll, and clicked on the last photo.
The image of a contorted, half-naked body appeared on the screen. The image was fully as horrible as Kristin remembered the original. The exposed skin on the body was marred by hard-looking blisters and fresh blood seeped from his mouth and nose.
Elena gagged once and ran from the room. Ramón and Sledge remained silent.
Kristin flicked through the remaining photos of the dead men. The eleven images proved to be everything she’d hoped for. They showed the convulsed bodies in full color under bright sunlight. One frame pictured the entire scene. The others were close-ups revealing more blisters, more blood seeping from mouths, ears, and noses, and pin-pointed pupils in the eyes. Even now, the sight of it almost made her retch.
She heard Ramón move quickly out to join Elena.
Sledge came forward and took the mouse from her hand. Kristin watched anxiously as he studied each photo in detail. Panorama Weekly could hire experts to advise about her story, but she hoped Sledge would make some suggestions.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Sledge grimaced. “You’re not only the stubbornest brat in Colombia, you’re the luckiest.”
She caught her breath. “Why lucky?”
“Lucky to be alive. There’s no doubt those men were killed by chemical agents. Several different ones, I think. One had to be a blister agent like mustard, and one must have been a nerve gas. I don’t know what else might have been used.”
“So why am I lucky to be alive?”
“The fresh blood proves you too
k the pictures soon after the men were killed. If the nerve gas had still been around, your pretty blue eyes would have had no more pupils than those poor guys in the photos.”
Kristin shuddered.
“So the nerve agent had to be something like sarin, which dissipates quickly,” Sledge continued. “If it had been a persistent agent like VX, you wouldn’t be here. In death a person's muscles all relax, including the eyes. You must have taken that photograph so soon after the moment of death that the pupils hadn't dilated. A few seconds sooner and you'd be dead.” He rubbed his jaw with his fist. “The blister agent is a problem. The ones I know don’t go away quickly. The one used here should still have been active when you arrived. But if it had, you’d have more marks on your complexion than Elena’s red dots.”
“So we have a mystery.”
“One the technical intelligence people will have to solve. Actually, more than one. I have no idea what caused the bleeding.”
“Have you heard of anything like it?” Kristin wouldn’t let go until she had to.
“Something fairly close.” Sledge seemed to be thinking out loud. “The old Soviet Union used multiple agents in Yemen, Laos, and Afghanistan.”
He paused. “Did you hear any aircraft before you found the bodies?”
“None at all. Why?”
“From what I’ve heard, the Soviets and their clients usually delivered their chemicals by air—like the ‘yellow rain’ used against Hmong villages in Laos in the seventies. Something like fifteen or twenty thousand Hmong were killed. Survivors outside the gassed villages saw what happened. The attacking planes put out different colors of smoke that drifted to the ground. When it got there, people fell down and began to die. Then a second group of planes would drop a yellow powder over everything. Witnesses said the victims went into convulsions and bled like the poor fellows in your photographs.”
“What could cause the bleeding?”