by Dan Pollock
Not very probable, Samuel, he thought, tightening his jaw into something like a smile. And, as D.W. had said, it would be a whole helluva lot better if those hostage-rescue boys could stay safely on the sidelines, checking out their deadly weapons. But one way or another, Jake was going to be free, and Sam was going to do his damnedest to bring it about. And for what it was worth, he wasn’t doing it for D.W., or even Jacqueline now, but for himself. Of such tarnished motives, apparently, were older heroes compounded.
There was a certain detached comfort in these gallant resolves, Sam realized. As long as he indulged them and envisioned variously desirable outcomes for this droning journey, he could keep at bay those other images, those nightmarish companions of his fears that he’d fled all day long. But finally, as a dark tide swept the Caribbean and still sleep would not come, those terrible imaginings had to be faced. For they, too, were intimate links with her.
Where was she now? he wondered, staring past his plexiglass reflection at a blue-black sky. What was she feeling, what was happening to her at this very instant?
Chapter Forty-One
Jacqueline Lee tried to assemble her shattered senses. For a long time now, sound had been reduced to a lone vibrato growl. It was the exact noise signature of an apple-green riding mower in Grandpa and Grandma Langlois’s huge back yard in the Berkshires, where she’d spent her grade-school summers. Grandpa Jack liked to cut his own grass and sit her in his lap while they went back and forth in the sun and then under the shade of the big maples and around and around the trunks, with a Red Sox game buzzing all the while.
But those were warm memories, and she was shivering now, as a chill wind and hard handfuls of water stung her face. Beyond her eyelids, which she dared not open, the world was dark, wet and cold. Underneath these perceptions was a layer of constant, shifting pain. Turn or scrunch how she might, an unyielding surface abraded her shoulders and hipbones, and there were all these odd-shaped places on her hands and feet and legs that wouldn’t stop throbbing.
Nor would fear let her go. It was a spreading wake teeming with monstrous events and grotesque images. Some were only imagined, others were real, and you couldn’t be sure which. That was because of the drug they gave you—the black powder they blew up your nose, even when you fought and shut your nostrils. They pinned your arms and poked your face with a bamboo tube, just like a giant coke tooter. Jacqueline had had one cocaine experience as an undergrad at Berkeley—two hits of pure China white that launched her heartbeat on a terrifying gallop, like a spooked horse she couldn’t ride or rein. She’d never tried it again. But as scary as that had been, the black dust was far worse. Her head began to expand and grow hotter and hotter, till her skull felt ready to burst. She remembered screaming, seeing fire shoot out of her mouth and liquid pour from every other orifice. Then the earth dissolved beneath her feet and she was sucked down a bottomless black hole like Alice, with hands grabbing at her but unable to stop or slow her down...
And now she was here, wherever this was, lying in the dark close to the endless lawn-mower sound. But where had she been all those jumbled hours before? She remembered only popping in and out of different nightmares, like wandering through a giant cineplex with a dozen screens and never finding the movie that was her own life...
In one dark theater she sat on Grandpa Jack’s lap, but when she looked up into his face, he turned into a huge Indian staring down at her—the same Indian who’d been tracking her for days and who held her arms while the little Indian blew the black dust up her nose. And she remembered being completely naked, fighting arms like tree trunks—then seeing sparkling glass everywhere and realizing that the big Indian was really protecting her...
Later she’d awakened on her back, still naked, in a forest in steaming sun with ants crawling over her and the big Indian crouching over her. He was doing something to her—smearing her legs with sticky brown paste. Her palms were also covered with this strange goo and smelled like river mud and resin and crushed leaves. The little Indian was nearby, watching this curious ritual. And she thought, The big one’s rubbing the sticky stuff where the pain was. Then she remembered the ship and the fire and screamed for her father, but a huge muddy hand was clapped over her mouth and she vanished...
Or did they blow her away with more black smoke? And, among all the partly recalled horrors, had she occluded rape? Yet she had this strange sense of intactness, and that the big Indian was protecting her from that, too. But from whom? The little Indian? Or were they simply saving her for later? She had read somewhere of remote Amazonian tribes, after many defective births, raiding neighboring tribes—and even missions and towns and trading posts—for new wives. Maybe she was being carried off into the jungle to replenish badly inbred genetic stock. She shivered with fresh horror, visualizing a life of Stone Age servitude—hunkering on the ground, cooking monkeys, eating grubs, obeying men with clubs...
Another spray of water hit her face and opened her eyes, shattering the long, drug-induced reverie. She was on a lake on a starry, moonless night, her aching tailbone pressed into the waterlogged bottom of a narrow wooden boat. Thank God, she was wearing something, a baggy jumpsuit of some kind. The lawn-mower sound was an outboard motor puttering behind her as the water rushed swiftly past them. In front of her were the dark shapes of two men and the tapering prow of a dugout canoe, the kind burned and hollowed out of a single log. She caught a blowback of tobacco smoke on the wet wind. Between the men and her was a jumble of gear.
Those must be the two Indians. And they wouldn’t know she was awake. There might be an advantage to that. But then who was steering? She twisted around. Against the faint smear of constellations and the dark, converging riverbanks, she saw the squat-bodied silhouette of the small Indian manning the outboard tiller. She twisted forward again. A point of light flared orange, etching a bearded face, and Jacqueline’s whole scarified memory slammed back into place.
Arquimedeo’s crazy uncle. Oscar, the ex-convict and terrorist. These were his Indians. He had firebombed Daddy’s ship, then kidnapped her.
And she thought, I have to escape! I have to do something!
But what? Try and overpower them? Scream for help? Who would hear her? Jump overboard and swim? Where? She couldn’t even see the shore. And what if they were on Guri Lake, really just a huge, dammed-up reservoir of the Caroní, a jungle river? The water could be infested with snakes and piranha and alligator-like caimans.
In the pulsing cigarette glow, she caught the gleam of teeth. The bastard was smiling! “Buenas noches, Señorita Lee,” he said. “You have a good sleep?”
“Fuck you!”
Then Jacqueline recalled an even filthier Spanish equivalent she’d learned from one of Dr. Laya’s volunteers on Cerro Calvario:
“Chinga tu madre!”
*
Oscar had chuckled at Señorita Lee’s little outburst. He had been anticipating the moment that she regained her senses, relishing the interview that would ensue. And at least to that point, he had not been disappointed.
How deliciously aristocratic the girl was, even in her attempt at cross-cultural vulgarity. But then, how else was a rich American bitch to rebuke a man immeasurably her social inferior, an ignorant campesino qualified only to carry her bags or hand her a towel at the country club swimming pool? Next, perhaps, she would demand her immediate return to her papa’s yacht—unless, of course, she chanced to remember the unpleasant little detail that papa’s yacht had been in flames when she’d fled it. But Oscar would not be at all surprised to discover that successive doses of chloroform and yopo administered over the last twenty-four hours had temporarily scrambled significant chunks of her memory.
Whatever she recalled of the kidnapping, and however she might choose to denounce him for it, Oscar knew the interview would end happily for him and badly for her, as she was made to realize the extent of her helplessness and of his ascendancy.
But he was wrong.
Their conversation was brie
f and ended badly for both of them. Only a few minutes afterward, in fact, it would have been difficult to say which of them was the more miserable. Both were then soaked to their skins and shivering. For his part, Oscar could not even light a cigarette. He’d just unbuttoned his shirt pocket to find his last pack a soggy ruin, while she suffered the further indignity of a noose around her slim neck, the other end of the rope tied to the thwart on which she sat.
Oscar was still stunned by what had happened.
After cursing him out, Señorita Lee had continued imperiously, demanding to be set free, then to know exactly where she was being taken—and by what right! One arrogant demand followed another. Oscar had laughed his most contemptuous laugh.
But Angel, who was seated in the prow to watch for snags and rocks and other nasty obstacles, had also heard her and was instantly solicitous. Naturally. The big Kamarakota had appointed himself her primitive champion from the first, protecting her in the truck from broken glass, then slathering her burns at the lakeside with some native slime he’d made from leaves, bark, sap and gobs of wet clay. Worst of all, Angel had then stripped off his own coveralls to clothe the unconscious girl—surely a crime in itself, not only diminishing her vulnerability, but depriving them all of an endlessly stimulating vision. And now he wanted to pass her a bottle of Chinotto soda and the remains of his salty white cheese! Oscar told the lovesick simpleton to shut up and keep his lookout.
The girl was not as easy to silence. When screamed at, she screamed right back. Ultimately, Oscar had threatened to drug her again, and that had worked. Or so he thought.
Then he heard a hollow clunk behind and felt the canoe tip slightly. Oscar turned. Her silhouette was suddenly tall and black against the night. Was she going to strike him? Mierda! Had she found their machete? Oscar raised his hands to ward off the deadly blow. Instead, the dugout rocked violently, followed by a girl-sized splash.
She’d jumped overboard!
In the middle of Guri Lake, in pitch black! Questions exploded in Oscar’s brain: Was it suicide? Madness? The yopo kicking in? Or was she willing to die trying to escape?
Whatever her impulse, Oscar’s was only an instant delayed. He launched himself over the side after her. If the bitch heiress weas lost, so was everything else! She represented his last hope of riches and revenge against a lifetime of failure. He thrashed blindly, gulping air and water. And when miraculously he bumped against her in the cold current, he grabbed with both arms to prevent her getting away. The ensuing struggle nearly drowned them both.
Only the swift work of the Kamarakotas prevented it, in fact. Chucho slammed the outboard into reverse idle, letting it glide backward with the current and steering toward the churning commotion. As they drew abreast, Angel slipped his huge bulk over the side, keeping a hand on the gunnel while the other clawed for bodies.
Oscar’s scraggly jaw was the first thing he felt—and shoved aside. An instant after, the Indian’s splayed fingers raked through tendrils of hair underwater. He made a fist and yanked hard. There was a throttled scream as the long hair jerked tight. Angel yanked again and felt her coming to him. In an instant he had an arm and used it to reel in the rest of her. Then she burst upward and against him, gasping for breath. For a split second, the Indian stared close up into terrified eyes under streaming hair. Then he submerged, using both hands and all his strength to boost her bodily out of the water and into Chucho’s waiting arms.
Angel was less gentle with Oscar, hauling him in, then rolling him head first over the side. Finally, taking care not to overbalance the narrow wooden craft, Angel dragged himself inboard straight over the prow.
Now, in the shivering aftermath, Oscar fought to regain some measure of mastery over the entire out-of-control operation. And it didn’t help that he could hear her behind him, chomping the cheese and slurping the soda Angel had insisted on providing her.
At least Chucho wasn’t in sullen rebellion or smitten with their capitalist captive. Then again, the elfin Indian was less quick to obey orders than he had been. For instance, when Señorita Lee was beginning to emerge from her chloroform haze, and Oscar had suggested she be put back under with yopo, Chucho had dared to refuse. Apparently the hallucinogenic powder wasn’t an approved ritual for females. Only after the most laborious persuasion had he gone along with the program. And Oscar thought he had detected a similar hesitancy on Chucho’s part just now in tethering Señorita Lee’s neck to the thwart—an obvious precaution against further suicidal plunges.
Despite these rankling shortcomings, Oscar had to admit that so far the brothers had performed better than he had any right to expect. On Cerro Calvario they’d shown themselves first-rate saboteurs. And on the San Félix docks, Chucho had not only carried out an assignment Oscar secretly considered to be kamikaze—planting the bomb on the ore ship—but actually escaped undetected. Then, just a few hours ago as darkness descended on Guri Lake, the Kamarakotas had ventured out to steal a boat and come back with an authentic curiara—an Indian dugout canoe—with a thirty-horsepower tiller-steer outboard on its transom and enough fuel drums stowed forward to take them hundreds of kilometers upstream on the Caroní. True, Oscar might have wished for something more comfortable; but, according to Chucho, the curiara was ideally shaped for the Sabana’s lesser tributaries.
Considering all these accomplishments, it was ironic to think that Oscar had hired them under false pretenses. For almost certainly, they’d fabricated their criminal past that night in the San Félix cantina—or at least embroidered it. Oh, undoubtedly they’d done time for brawling or public drunkenness or something trivial. And their account of teenage escapades that turned them into tribal renegades seemed authentic. But their responses to some of Oscar’s queries in the last few days had convinced him that neither had worked for any Colombian cartel—not even as lowly mules. And when Angel had plunged into daylong grief after accidentally killing the CANTV man, it was clear he’d never been an enforcer for the Ochoa brothers or anyone else. Oscar figured they must have been desperate for any kind of work and simply repeated jailhouse stories to impress him.
Which made them, in a way, exactly like himself—outcasts. Oscar, too, had been banished from his past, failed to acculturate into the present—and had no discernible future. Having outlived his fanatic youth, he’d become more or less a middle-aged brigand, bereft of revolutionary justification. Even in prison, with all his impressive credentials, the young pistoleros there had treated him with open contempt, or, at best, the sort of supercilious tolerance he had regularly endured from his smart-assed little nephew. So perhaps, after all, Oscar and the Kamarakota brothers were a well-matched team.
Unfortunately that had all changed with the addition of their willful hostage. From the moment she’d arrived—like an exiled princess in the back of the phone truck, cradled in Angel’s arms—the dynamics among the three of them had been thrown way the hell off. It was made instantly clear, for instance, that Oscar was to be denied intimate access to his lovely captive—and thus denied a reward that was properly any kidnapper’s, and certainly one of the more anticipated facets of the whole scheme.
He had not, after all, scouted and pursued this privileged creature simply for her ransom value, though he might have done so, had she been plain. No, he had coveted Señorita Lee from that first afternoon glimpse through binoculars on Cerro Calvario, watching—with the seasoned avidity of the connoisseur—her bouncing, denim-stretching bottom as she rode out beside Sam Warrender. But here, when the girl was wholly delivered to him, he dared hardly glance at her with strong intent. And only by killing both Angel and Chucho—now his indispensable bush guides—would he be able to lay a single hand on her!
To make matters worse, she was obviously aware of all this. Right now, as he sat shivering, listening to the outboard snarl and the wooden boat’s whispery cleavage through the enveloping void of lake and sky, he could feel the hostility radiating from her back there. And there was nothing to prevent her from mocki
ng him, so long as she was under Angel’s watchful protectorate.
Indeed, Oscar had a sudden and irrevocable sense that from here on, everything would go wrong, and that there wasn’t one damn thing he could do to alter it. And now, because of his unscheduled midnight swim, he couldn’t even enjoy a good smoke!
To hell with her ransom value. He should have let the bitch drown!
Chapter Forty-Two
“To understand why Caracas is taking such a hard-ass line,” Sam was saying to D.W., “you just have to look at 1976, when an American executive got himself kidnapped down here by some terrorist faction. One of the demands was for the company—it was Owens-Illinois—to publish an indictment of itself and of the Venezuelan government in the foreign press. President Pérez—that was his first term—had already refused to negotiate. But the company caved in and ran the rhetoric anyway. Pérez responded by expropriating all its Venezuelan property.”
“I’d make that deal in a second to get Jake free!” D.W. shot back. “I’d repeat any damn garbage they want. Let Caracas take our assets, let the Proteus board fire me later.”
“Hey, you’ll get no argument from me. I’m just trying to show you how they look at it—and how most governments look at it. And they’re in total charge on this. So any dealing we do with this bastard Azarias, assuming it’s him, it’s got to be strictly between him and us, not through the media. And you have to understand that Captain Siso and that red-beret colonel are going to be breathing down our neck all the way.”
It was early afternoon of the second day after the kidnapping, with no word from Jacqueline or her captors. And, except for the abandoned truck, there was still no leads to their whereabouts. In consequence, the search radius had not diminished. And D.W. was having an increasingly hard time holding together, Sam thought, and just getting through each minute of each agonizing hour. Sam, who had managed precious little sleep himself in the Citation jet coming down, and none at all during the morning briefings, figured he probably didn’t look much better.