Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  On the other side of the island Carmen was sitting at her favourite table outside the Dutch Inn, staring out at the darkened sea. She knew what was supposed to be happening that evening, and she had tried to picture the different scenes in her mind, but her subconscious kept pushing her forward twenty-four hours to the moment of truth.

  She had resisted being left out, but now, in the privacy of her own thoughts, she could admit how terrified she was. In Cartagena it had all seemed like a game, but now it all seemed real again, and she was worried that she might let Shepreth and Docherty down.

  She should do something to take her mind off it, she thought. But what? She was hardly in the mood for dancing, and going for a walk at night seemed like asking for trouble. She could always go to bed, but she knew that her chances of getting to sleep were slim. Tomorrow was probably going to be the most exciting day of her life – she would either rescue her sister or end up sharing her prison.

  The idea made her shiver.

  She thought about the Englishmen. They seemed confident enough, but for all she knew they were hopelessly outmatched. Bazua would hardly have lasted as long as he had if he’d been a pushover.

  12

  Blackie and Bonnie came over on the early-afternoon shuttle from San Andrés, took a pick-up around the island to Aguadulce and spent an idle half-hour lounging in the bar of the Hotel Princesa. At three o’clock Wynwood passed through the bar, but made no attempt to talk to them – the sign that everything was still going according to plan. A few minutes later the two young men walked back outside, where they shook hands and parted like recent acquaintances. Blackie walked down the beach towards the dock, leaving Bonnie waiting by the side of the road for a pick-up going north.

  The Glaswegian had to wait only ten minutes, and the journey up to Puerto Viejo took less than that. He walked down the dirt track to what the guidebook claimed was the island’s cheapest hotel, paid for a room, dumped his bag and went out again, walking north around the rim of Santa Catalina Bay to Santa Isabel, where he ate an early lobster supper at the same restaurant Wynwood and Stoneham had used the day before.

  After watching the sun sink into the bay over a couple of Cokes he started walking slowly back to his hotel, reaching it just before eight. He took a vigorous shower, laid himself out on the bed of his spartan room and stared at the patterns of peeling paint on the ceiling. At £2.50 a night the place was a steal.

  At ten he turned the light off, waited a few minutes, then slipped out of the door. There was music spilling out of an open doorway across the yard, and a couple on a bench above the beach seemed to have their tongues in a knot, but no one looked his way as he turned the corner of the building and hurried up the dirt track to the main road. There was a light on in the two-storey shop at the intersection but it went out as he approached.

  He took the road south, still walking briskly. The moon was rising in the east, and for a while he could see its light scattered across the sea to his right, but then the road cut inland, running almost like a tunnel through the tropical woodland. He walked on, trying to calculate the distance. The path was supposed to be slightly over a kilometre from the shop, and just as he began to think that he must have walked that far, there it was, winding up alongside the stream into the darkness of the forest. He took the prescribed fifty paces and gave a faint whistle.

  There was an answering whistle, and a few moments later Wynwood emerged out of the darkness. The Welshman was already kitted up, his face beneath the PNGs artistically streaked with camouflage cream, a CT100 unit fastened to his collar, an MP5SD cradled in his arms. He gave Bonnie a pair of PNGs and gestured him to follow, and for the next few minutes they threaded their way along an invisible path through the dense foliage. Several times Bonnie felt the brush of unknown entities on his face and offered up several silent prayers to the effect that any poisonous spiders or snakes on the island had already been endangered out of existence.

  There was another faint whistle from Wynwood, an echo up ahead, and in the green glow of the PNGs Bonnie could see three other figures sitting on the forest floor. One was a wiry-looking, short-haired man with a half-amused expression on his face, the second a taller man of not much more than Bonnie’s own age, the third…was a woman. Like everyone else she had darkened her face with make-up, but unlike the others she wasn’t wearing body armour.

  ‘Get kitted up,’ Wynwood told him.

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Bonnie said, and did as he was told, wondering who the woman was. By the time he had finished there were still nearly two hours of boredom to enjoy before they moved off down the hill.

  Stoneham had casually picked up Blackie from his dockside vantage-point soon after four, introduced him to the boat’s owner as a fellow-Brit that he’d just met, and offered him a few hours of fishing. Blackie had been suitably thrilled, and, pantomime over, they had taken the boat a couple of miles offshore, where they watched the sun go down and argued over whether Sheringham or Fowler should be partnering Shearer in England’s attack in the ’98 World Cup.

  Once the sun had gone down they moved lazily north, heading in to shore to collect the weapons bag from among the mangrove roots. They then rode at anchor for a while, as Stoneham put together several explosive devices.

  By ten-thirty they were off Aguadulce again, eating sandwiches and taking turns observing the small military post through the nightscope. As on the two preceding nights, there was virtually no visible activity – just a single uniformed sentry sitting in an upright chair at the landward end of the protruding dock and one window showing light in the command building. There was no sign of anyone aboard the patrol boat which was tied up on one side of the jetty.

  At eleven-forty the light went out, and at midnight the sentry was relieved. His replacement walked down to the end of the dock and back before settling into the already warmed seat.

  Two minutes later Blackie lowered himself over the side of the boat and began swimming towards the shore, the waterproof pouches containing the two bombs strapped across his chest. The water was warm, he was a good swimmer and as far as he could tell there weren’t any sharks closing in for the kill.

  As he approached the jetty the patrol boat came between him and the sentry’s line of sight. He worked his way round to the stern, where he fastened the first of the two explosive devices to the rudder-propeller assembly which lay just beneath the surface. He then carefully inched through the water to a position beneath the landward end of the dock and looked at his watch. There were two minutes to wait. He hung there in the water, one arm wrapped around a jetty support.

  Stoneham started the engine right on cue, and there was an almost imperceptible rise in the decibel level as he brought it in towards the dock. The sentry heard the boat too, if he hadn’t already noticed it with his eyes. There was a scraping sound as he got up from his chair, and then the creak of boots on wooden boards. He yelled something in Spanish – something along the lines of ‘You can’t dock here, you fucking idiot!’ – and there was an obsequious reply from Stoneham, requesting further directions. Blackie pulled himself out of the water and on to the jetty. Twenty metres to his right the sentry was standing there gesticulating, his back turned toward the base. Blackie took the five steps necessary to get him through the gate and sank to his haunches. He could hardly believe that something so obvious could have worked, and he felt grateful that he hadn’t had to cut the sentry’s throat. Or at least not yet.

  The compound seemed deserted. It was even less well lit than the dock, with three of the four floodlights either off or broken, and two bare light bulbs shining forlornly above the doors to the two main buildings. Behind him the conversation was still going on, the sentry sounding increasingly exasperated with this stupid gringo God had pushed in his direction.

  Blackie moved towards the helicopter pad, checking the fence to his right for possible ways out. He found several. Over the years the sea had eaten away at the foundation and in several places the bottom of the fence si
mply lifted like a flap. It looked like the sentry was going to see another dawn.

  After securing the second explosive to the underside of the helicopter’s nose cone, Blackie scuttled back to the fence and slipped underneath it. The rocks below were slippery, but the sentry was still standing with his back to the shore, watching Stoneham turn the boat around. Blackie slid into the water and began swimming after it. Five minutes later he was clambering over the side.

  They headed out to sea, not turning north until they were some three kilometres from land and the lights of Aguadulce were strung like a necklace beneath the silhouette of the hills beyond. Almost immediately they turned back towards the shore, and soon after twelve-thirty they were lying about two hundred metres off the coast and about twice that distance south of the target dock. The two boats earmarked for Bazua’s Falklands invasion were drifting at anchor some fifty metres offshore.

  They were now within CT100 range of the others.

  ‘The charges are set,’ Stoneham reported to Wynwood, and as he said the words his ears picked up the sound of a plane. ‘What the fuck?’ he murmured to himself – there were no night flights to or from the island.

  ‘It’s up there,’ Blackie told him, pointing. ‘It’s a big plane, an airliner.’

  ‘It’s a Caravelle,’ Stoneham said, half to himself and half to Wynwood. ‘It’s coming in to land at the airport.’

  ‘That explains it,’ Shepreth whispered to the others.

  Fifteen minutes earlier four men had emerged from the house below, clambered into the Cadillac which one of them had collected from the garage and disappeared in the direction of Santa Isabel. None of the departees had been in uniform, which seemed to suggest they were Bazua’s men.

  ‘The Caravelle must be en route from Colombia to Mexico,’ Shepreth went on. ‘Probably with about five million dollars’ worth of heroin on board. Bazua’s boys will be making sure nothing leaves the plane while it’s refuelling.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable,’ Wynwood murmured. He did some mental arithmetic. It would take them ten to fifteen minutes to reach the airport, the same to get back, and the jet would probably be on the ground for at least half an hour. Say an hour in total. The poor bastards were going to miss the party.

  He took a quick glance at the others, all of whom looked as tense as he felt, and gave the signal for go.

  They worked their way back to the path and descended it in single file. A car went by on the road below, its headlights flaring green through the PNGs and the noise of its engine slowly fading to the north, leaving them with only the sounds of the breeze and the burbling stream.

  Reaching the moonlit strip of road, they broke into a steady trot, ears and eyes alert for the sound of traffic, ready to dive back into the shadows of the trees. A hundred metres later they turned off, clambering across the crumbling wall of the property next door to their target. The large house that loomed away to their right was in no better shape than the wall, but would doubtless make some developer a fortune in the future.

  It was Docherty who had scouted this route and he was in the lead now, working his way through the overgrown garden and adjacent woodland to the fence which surrounded Bazua’s luxury prison. As Bonnie went to work with the wire-cutters, the others squatted down to wait. By Wynwood’s watch it was twelve forty-eight.

  The seconds ticked by, punctuated by the click of the cutters. Shepreth shared a nervous smile with Carmen, and resisted the temptation to reopen the earlier argument about the body armour. She was right – provided she kept out of the way as she’d promised, he would be the one who needed it.

  Carmen was grateful for the smile. She felt scared, and would have been more so if it hadn’t all seemed so unreal. Here she was squatting by a wire fence in the middle of the night with a bunch of gringos, her face covered with gunk, a gun tucked under her belt. She had never fired one in her life.

  The click of the wire-cutters had stopped. Bonnie lifted the flap and beckoned to the others.

  Wynwood examined his watch again. ‘We’re going through the fence,’ he said softly into the microphone.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Stoneham murmured in all their earpieces.

  ‘Remember,’ Wynwood reminded the others. ‘Don’t speak any English if you can help it.’

  They squirmed through the hole one by one and headed on through the forest, Wynwood in the lead, followed by Bonnie, Docherty, Shepreth and finally Carmen. In the distance a thin wash of green light seemed to be filtering through the trees, but it was impossible to tell whether it was man-made or a trick of the moon.

  They had only about two hundred metres to travel, but it seemed a long time before the first rectangular shadow appeared in front of them. This was the northernmost of the two specially constructed buildings which extended in a westerly direction behind the main house, on either side of the swimming pool. There were only a few narrow windows visible, and none of these showed any illumination, but a faint green glow above the roof suggested a light source in the open courtyard beyond.

  It was now twelve fifty-seven. The column split into two groups, with Wynwood and Bonnie moving to the left and the others to the right, heading for opposite ends of the building in front of them.

  The threesome didn’t have so far to go. Docherty took off his PNGs and inched an eye round the first corner. There was no one visible, and no light from the end window, which they were hoping was the one that Victoria Marín had seen filled by the moon. The only other east-facing window was in the building on the other side of the pool, and the satellite photos had shown a basketball hoop on that end wall.

  It was twelve fifty-eight. Shepreth had ushered Carmen into the nearby trees, and was now employing the same hopeful gestures dog owners use when trying to persuade their animals to stay. Docherty advanced along the end wall and put an eye round the next corner.

  To his left a faint yellow glow filled the distant doorway to the main house, but no lights showed in any of the windows. During their various stints on watch over the past week Carmen and Docherty had never seen any signs of life in this part of the compound, and the current plan of attack was based on the assumption that it was unoccupied.

  The two buildings on the other side of the swimming pool were definitely in use, and thin lines of brightness around the central windows and doors of one indicated that the communications room was still operational. Both the room to its right and the small building to its left – which they had guessed contained a back-up generator – were in darkness.

  There were no outside lights burning, but the pool’s underwater lights were on, casting a shimmering blue glow over the whole courtyard.

  A dull thump sounded in the far distance, then another. If he hadn’t known better Docherty would have assumed there was a fireworks party in Aguadulce. His watch told him it was exactly one o’clock.

  As Shepreth appeared at his shoulder, Wynwood and Bonnie came into view away to the left, carefully skirting the back of the villa. The young Glaswegian took up a position from which he could cover both the gate through to the interior courtyard and the doors facing the communications room. Wynwood was about twenty metres away from the latter when its door suddenly swung open and a man strode out. He saw the SAS man coming towards him, took in the gun and camouflaged face, and opened his mouth, either as a prelude to shouting or simply to gape with surprise. Wynwood’s MP5 spat fire, throwing the man back, and there was the sound of something breaking in the room behind him.

  Docherty had already started forwards along the front of the other building, and as the first sicario went down he opened the first door and tossed in the stun grenade, then pulled it shut once more. The thunderclap seemed to rattle the window, and a line of light flashed in the gap beneath the door. He stepped quickly in across the threshold and dropped to one knee, MP5 at the ready, but it took only a second for his senses to conclude that the room was empty.

  ‘Shit,’ he murmured. So much for moons in the window.

  On
the other side of the swimming pool Wynwood had reached the communications room door at a run, which was just as well, as another of Bazua’s men was halfway to his feet, gun in hand. Wynwood put a triple tap through his upper trunk, spinning him back and round across the chair he’d been sitting in. Man and chair collapsed in a heap, taking the floor fan with them. This ended up on the dead man’s face, whirring at the ceiling.

  Wynwood’s eyes scoured the room. There was a sophisticated array of radio equipment, plus the usual telephone and fax, but there was no sign of any records – no computer, no filing cabinets, no leather briefcase with the words ‘Dirty War’ embossed in gold.

  Docherty and Shepreth were only a few metres from the next door when it burst open, disgorging two men, both dressed only in shorts. As one fired his Uzi from the hip in the general direction of the communications room the other took off at a run for the far end of the swimming pool. Bonnie ducked back inside the doorway, which gave Docherty a safe shot at the man with the Uzi, whose body was propelled forward into the pool, where its impact on the water made a resounding splash and caused shivers of blue light to dance wildly over all the walls.

  The other man was past the end of the pool now, and had almost reached the shelter of the main villa, when Bonnie cut him down. The Colombian’s gun seemed to keep firing as it cartwheeled out of his hand and glass cascaded down from broken windows in the main house.

  Four down, Docherty thought, but where the fuck was Bazua?

  The sound of running feet made him spin round, just as the two guards from the dock emerged out of the trees to his right. Shepreth opened up first, and one man went down, but the other turned tail and ran, spraying bullets behind him as SAS fire zipped through the foliage to either side.

  It was like a shooting gallery, Docherty thought. But where were the fucking prizes?

  There were more doors to open – the one leading into the room with the basketball hoop outside, which Wynwood was now moving towards, and the last two on this side of the pool. The first of these, the one from which the two sicarios had burst, opened into a dormitory of sorts, with several beds, posters of naked women with their legs invitingly spread, a large TV. There was even a pool table, but Bazua wasn’t cowering underneath it.