Camp Valor

by Scott McEwen

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  This is dedicated to our kids. We have left you a difficult world but can only hope we have given you the skills within it to survive and thrive.

  PROLOGUE

  April 14, 1984, Night

  Private Mooring off the Island of Eleuthera, Bahamas

  It was day nine of a ten-day cruise aboard the Honduran mega-yacht La Crema, a dream vacation for most families. Not a drop of rain, seas glassy, humidity low, and yet the boys, both high-school freshmen, had hardly left their rooms. The culprit: video games. Donkey Kong, to be exact. And Colonel Victor Marvioso Madrugal Degas had had enough.

  The Colonel yearned to barge into his son’s stateroom, rip the Nintendo from the wall, and hurl the console through a porthole, right into the Caribbean, where the boys should have been swimming and snorkeling all along. But his son, Wilberforce, or Wil, as he had started calling himself in boarding school in the United States, seemingly had no interest in any activities outside of electronic games. And the Colonel’s wife, Claudia, would probably have dove in after the video game, lest, god forbid, they deprive their son of the mighty Kong.

  So, with a measure of self-control highly unusual for a man who cut his teeth running death squads, the Colonel patiently sipped rum, smoked thin little cigars, and cheated at poker until 10 p.m., when he rose from the card table and told his guests he would be returning shortly. He jerked his chin to signal Claudia and two bodyguards to follow. Vámonos. Time to put women and niños to bed.

  The boys didn’t hear the door open but the scent of rum and cigarillos flooded the room. Neither moved, both hunkered down in front of the pixilated screen, listening to Prince’s “Purple Rain” on Wil’s jam box. The Colonel cringed. That music was for weirdos.

  Wil’s mother entered first, swaying more than usual. She accidentally stepped on the back of Wil’s leg, spiking his calf with her high-heeled shoe.

  “Jeez, Mom, watch where you’re going!” Wil said.

  Claudia planted a slobbery kiss on her son’s cheek, muttering an apology about Dramamine and wine. She staggered out into the hallway, long nails clawing at the walls for support, and bumped her way down to the master stateroom.

  “Niños,” said the Colonel, clapping his hands. “It is ten o’clock. Time for bed.”

  “No, Daddy. Please, no. Just one more game. Please,” said Wil. “I’m up against my personal best.”

  But Wil’s friend rose. “Wil,” the boy said, “we promised we’d stop at ten. It’s time.” He yawned. “Plus, I think you’ll do better in the morning.”

  “Good call.” Wil snapped off the game and then the radio.

  “Thank you, Wil,” said the Colonel, patting his son’s head, but secretly irritated that Wil had been far quicker to obey his friend’s request than his own. “Okay, you should brush your teeth, put on your PJs. And you—” the Colonel said, pointing to his son’s friend, “Manuelito will escort you to your room. Goodnight.”

  As soon as the boy was out of earshot, Wil asked, “Why can’t Chris stay in my room? Why does he have to sleep in the back of the ship with the servants?”

  “Because you are almost fifteen. Too old for sleepovers and…” He motioned to the Nintendo. “Video games and that make-believe game you play with wizards and strange things.”

  “You mean Dungeons and Dragons?”

  “Yes,” said the Colonel. “All of that childishness will end. As soon as it is safe for you to return to your own country, I’ll send you to live with Abuela,” the Colonel said with a smile, fondly recalling his youth. “You will be raised in the village where I grew up. You will attend military academy during the day, and your abuela will take care of you, whip you into shape, and make you strong. Like she did with me.” The Colonel drew in a breath, puffed out his chest, and struck a proud pose.

  But Wil’s abuela scared him. She wore a nightgown all day, had a thick mustache, and smelled like a wet diaper. “Then I hope it is never safe to return home!” Wil said.

  The Colonel’s fist moved faster than his mind. The boy’s head snapped back—a good right cross—and Wil collapsed at the Colonel’s Gucci slippers, blood seeping from the gash on his chin, courtesy of the Colonel’s pinky ring—a hunk of gold and a large pink diamond. Wil began to moan a slow, loud wail that reminded the Colonel of old-fashioned fire alarms. The Colonel was disgusted. Cry like a man, he wanted to say, and then he tried to imagine a context in which it was acceptable for a man to cry—an Olympic podium, perhaps? Instead, the Colonel said what fathers always say, “We’ll discuss this in the morning.” He stepped over his bawling son and left the room.

  “Lock him in,” the Colonel said to the guard waiting in the hallway. “Same with his friend in the back of the boat. And make sure neither leaves their room tonight.”

  The Colonel turned on his heels, enjoying the silky feeling of his slippers on the plush coral carpet, and headed back to the Game Room. He was eager to return to his beloved gambling, but an unpleasant thought nagged at him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Wil’s friend, whose name he could never remember. Ken, Carl, Chris? Something boring like that. Chris Gibbs. Yes, that was his name.

  No, Chris was okay by the Colonel. In fact, the Colonel thought the Gibbs boy was a decent kid—healthy, tall, thick head of hair, good teeth. He was athletic in that wiry kind of way, which makes for good baseball pitchers and fútbol goalies. Chris was the kind of boy the Colonel wished his son would emulate. What bothered the Colonel about Wil’s friend was that he couldn’t figure out why he was friends with his son. Wilberforce was different. Strange. He was a Latino teenager with no fire, pale and gloomy. He had yellow, crooked teeth, absentmindedly pulled out his own hair, and smelled funny. Why would this normal upstanding American boy spend time with his weird little son? Was the boy using Wil for access to money and power? Perhaps. The Colonel himself had exploited and ultimately betrayed every friend he’d ever had. Even that would be understandable. But even more troubling, what if the boy wasn’t using his son for gain? What if the friendship was the result of something else? Something unnatural? Their friendship did not feel natural. The Colonel couldn’t quite place what it was that bothered him about the boy, but he was absolutely certain something wasn’t right. As helpful and friendly and polite as the boy seemed, the Colonel sensed a threat, and the Colonel had excellent instincts in such things.

  * * *

  The Colonel was right to worry. The boy, whose real name and identity were classified Top Secret and known only to the highest levels of the U.S. military, climbed into his bed and waited until the guard locked the door from the outside, effectively trapping him in his room.

  The boy rose, crept to the door, and pressed his ear to it, listening for the guard’s retreating footsteps, but he heard nothing. The Colonel must have ordered the guard to stay outside, and the boy was fine with that. The team that had prepared him for this mission had pla
nned for every conceivable eventuality, including this one.

  Thumbing the radio beside his bed, the boy found a crackly reggae channel broadcasted from Nassau. He moved to the window, noticing heat lightning flickering along the western horizon. The porthole was about ten inches wide and two feet tall, just wide enough to fit through. It was, to a degree, fortunate that the Colonel had put him in a staff cabin in the rear of the boat. The nicer staterooms in the bow had much smaller portholes, too small for a boy to fit through. The only challenge with the portholes in the staff cabins was that they were secured by brass tumbler locks. But this was another obstacle for which the boy had been prepared. He pulled a Trapper Keeper from the bottom of his backpack and removed a strip of metal and a hairpin from the spine. He bent the strip of metal, inserted the short end into the lock, followed by the hairpin, jiggling them both until the lock clicked open. So far so good. The boy released the battens and, leaning his shoulder into the glass, popped open the window. Fresh ocean air poured in. The air smelled faintly of ozone. He noted the distant thunder. Rain was imminent.

  The boy moved quickly, yanking the sheets from the bed and tying them together in a square knot. He secured one end to the bed frame and lowered the other out the window, the fabric fluttering almost to the waterline. When that was done, he stripped to his bathing suit and removed a pair of snorkeling fins and a diving belt from his luggage, noting that he hadn’t even used his snorkeling equipment this trip because Wil never wanted to swim.

  The boy then stuck his head out the window and looked up toward the main deck. He could see light flickering as guards paced back and forth, some twenty feet above him. The sentries were not looking down, at least, not straight down. He squeezed his body through the window like a rat through a crack in a wall, rappelled silently down the sheet-rope, and slipped into the warm water of the Caribbean. It felt good to be in the sea, instead of sealed in a stateroom with Wil, a video-game addict and farting machine.

  Taking a deep breath of fresh air, the boy dove down, and following the deep hull of the ship, he swam underneath the boat and surfaced on the other side, exactly fifteen feet beneath the private balcony of the Colonel’s suite. From a hidden pocket in the diving belt, the boy removed two suction cups, which he stuck to the side of the boat. Then, slipping off his flippers, he separated the footholds from the rubber fins—both of which looked like normal snorkeling gear but were specially made for this mission. He strapped the fins to his knees and looped the footholds over the suction cups, pulling down until they clicked into place, creating handgrips. Using the suction cup handgrips and the rubber kneepads, he scaled the port side of the yacht, making tiny squeaks as wet flesh brushed against the polished fiberglass.

  The French doors to the balcony had been left open, and the silk curtains undulated in the breeze. The boy hovered outside and listened. Along with the distant rumble of thunder, he heard Claudia snoring away inside, the Valium he’d slipped into her drink at dinner clearly working. As for the Colonel, he would be at the card table, as he was every night until early morning.

  The boy lowered himself onto the balcony and slowly peered inside. A human lump lay flat on her back in bed, sweaty skin glistening in the moonlight, still dressed, her eyes covered by a velvet eye mask and an expensive perm puffing out at the sides. The rest of the room was dark, faintly lit by a single reading lamp and the twittering lightning. Using his hands, the boy squeezed the water off his skin, and it pooled at his feet. He leaned past the curtains and looked about the room. Almost instantly, he smelled the thin scent of cigarillos and froze, scanning for signs of the Colonel, but seeing none, he made his way to the gold-plated phone on the Colonel’s desk. His intention was to remove the transceiver he’d placed in the mouthpiece the first night of their voyage. The transceiver broadcasted a weak radio signal that was picked up by a Nagra reel-to-reel recorder hidden in a game cartridge back in the boy’s room. He had used the hidden transceiver and Nagra to record numerous conversations between the Colonel and Latin American and European leaders, conversations that would be enormously valuable to the U.S. government, so long as the recordings remained secret and the tapes were safely transferred to the U.S. intelligence community. The key to a successful operation was not just getting out with intelligence but doing so unnoticed. Which was why the boy was debugging the Colonel’s room. All he had left to do was toss the transceiver over the side of the boat and return to his room, and the mission would be another resounding success for Camp Valor.

  The boy was reaching for the gaudy phone when lightning flickered once more. He saw his own shadow on the floor ahead of him, but there was another one with it. A shadow of a figure pursuing him from behind. A man’s silhouette. A gun clearly leveled at the back of the boy’s head.

  Instantly, the boy’s training took hold. Instead of moving away, he jumped back, closing the distance between them. He slammed his hand onto the top slide of the gun, but the barrel didn’t move. The hammer bit down onto the webbing between his thumb and his index finger, slicing his flesh. It hurt like hell, but the gun didn’t go off.

  The boy could see the figure now. The Colonel. His eyes wide and a little whiter than usual—shocked. The boy clamped down on the Colonel’s gun, and the hammer fell a second time. The boy did not wait for a third, yanking the gun away.

  “Heeellll—” The Colonel began to yell for help, but the boy threw a fist into the Colonel’s solar plexus. Breath exploded from the Colonel’s throat, the wind squarely knocked from his lungs. He tried to tackle the boy, but the boy ducked and, executing a simple grappling maneuver, slipped behind the Colonel, putting the man in a chokehold. He kicked the Colonel’s legs out from under him and dug his forearm into his carotid artery, simultaneously cutting off his breath and the flow of blood to his brain. And that was pretty much it.

  The Colonel couldn’t believe it. He’d lost the advantage so fast. It didn’t seem fair or real. He deserved a do-over. Like he was in one of his son’s video games. But this kid, this boy from los Estados Unidos, was not playing. He was a pro. The Colonel knew he was going to die and he couldn’t do a single thing about it. If he could have spoken, he would have begged for his life. Begged like the thousands before who had pleaded with him for their lives.

  I’ve had a pretty good run, the Colonel admitted to himself. And now this kid, this little turd, has me in a death grip.

  He almost had to respect it.

  * * *

  An hour or so later, the boy was back in his berth in the stern of the boat, lying on top of the bed. The radio on, the guard snoozed in the hallway. Everything was back in place—the sheets on the bed, the porthole glass fastened, the flippers and diving belt stowed away. Like he never left.

  And yet nothing was right. A body drifted in the Gulf Stream, weighted down by a lead doorstop. A body the boy had put there. Yes, there was one less mass murderer walking the planet, but there was also one less thug to keep the others in check. One less crappy husband. One less father.

  The boy lay awake, listening to the rain, wondering what the chain of events he had just set in motion would look like in the coming days and years. What changes would the Colonel’s death bring? What would happen to Wil, to the Colonel’s country? Most pressing, the boy wondered if he had perfectly covered his tracks, or if he would be caught in the morning.

  He couldn’t say for sure, but he held a small packet of cyanide weighing heavily in a sweaty hand, just in case he’d made a mistake.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Early June 2017

  Millersville County, U.S.A.

  With two days left before summer break, Wyatt was restless. Sleep evaded him. He had the window open, the fan aimed at his bed, churning at full speed. But the air coming in wasn’t all that much cooler than the boiling stuff going out. And it smelled of concrete, tar, and whatever sat cooking in the garbage can a few paces from the windowsill—remnants of whatever Wyatt’s aunt Narcissa had gobbled up and flung
out the door with a well-practiced flick of her sausage fingers. A Styrofoam container slimed with sesame chicken, empty egg roll wrappers, a can of SpaghettiOs, a box of pigs in a blanket, BBQ short ribs sucked clean and bone white.

  Aunt Narcy and her pile of bones hadn’t always been there. It wasn’t that long ago that Wyatt’s mom made pancakes shaped like superheroes for breakfast and brought lemonade to Wyatt and his little brother’s baseball games. She drove carpool, helped with math homework. But those days had ended eight months ago, when Wyatt’s dad packed a bag, climbed into his rig like he did every month, and pulled out. But this time he never came home. No word. No call. The days passed and holidays went by—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day. Wyatt tried every trick he knew to scour the Internet to find his dad, conducting Boolean searches, sourcing the deep Web. Not a trace. The Millersville police weren’t much help. They filed a missing persons report, of course, but they couldn’t even locate his truck. And since money kept appearing in his mother’s bank account every month, the police assumed they were not dealing with a homicide.

  “Mrs. Brewer,” the lead investigator told his mother in the kitchen one afternoon, “you need to prepare yourself for the likely possibility that your husband is alive, but wanted to disappear.”

  The idea of abandonment destroyed Wyatt’s mom. She took to her bed for days on end, no more pancakes, and eventually, no more cooking or cleaning at all. School became an afterthought. Her sister Narcy moved in, supposedly to help. But Narcy just made things suck even more. She talked trash about Wyatt’s dad and made his mom think the worst. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had another family,” Narcy whispered to his mother one afternoon.

  Another family? Wyatt couldn’t stop thinking about it in his bed later that night. He was lying there, bathed in sweat and a fog of garbage stink, eyes wide open, when he noticed a little pool of light playing on the wall, glimmering at the end of the bunk bed he shared with Cody, his younger brother.