Forced Disappearance

by Marton, Dana

  “It’s called a rainforest for a reason.” He scanned the tree canopy. “And a roof will keep the bugs and snakes that fall out of the trees from landing on top of us.” Another thing he’d learned during his trek through the jungle.

  She shrugged.

  He bit back a smile. Ten years ago, she would have run screaming for the hills at the mention of snakes and bugs. He supposed she’d faced that and worse in the army. She’d toughened up. A pretty amazing package of brains, beauty, and strength. He gave up resisting being impressed by her.

  He sat up. “Let’s start by looking for some large leaves.”

  He checked around, hoping for some banana palms. He couldn’t see any of those, but did see some kind of other plant with leaves that were as large as a combo platter at an average US restaurant. “I’ll make the roof, you go and find firewood.”

  “Deal.”

  “It might take a while. Finding dry wood in a rainforest is about as easy as it sounds.”

  “I’ll manage.” She took one of the canteens, her knife, and her gun.

  “Don’t go too far,” he called after her. He didn’t want to get separated.

  But she stayed within shouting distance. While he worked at jerry-rigging a semi-decent roof over the bamboo platform, he could hear her moving around in the woods, walking around the campsite in a wide circle, branches snapping.

  Somehow she managed to return with an armload of wood and even a handful of smaller branches for kindling.

  “Were you in Iraq all this time?” he asked as they worked on stacking the logs in a teepee-shaped formation. For tinder, he used half the cigarettes he’d gotten off one of the soldiers.

  “At the beginning,” she said, blowing on the tinder once he lit it. “After the troop drawdown began, I joined Personnel Recovery. PR looks for soldiers and DOD contractors who disappear in an operational environment.”

  He shoved the burning tinder in the middle of the kindling and watched the small sticks catch on fire. “I’m not a soldier or a DOD contractor,” he observed as he watched her, on her knees, bending toward the fire to blow, her firm behind sticking up in the air, making his palms itch.

  “I left the army,” she said between two puffs.

  “Why?”

  Instead of answering, she sat back on her heels. “We have nothing to eat.”

  “We won’t starve until morning. Once the sun comes up, we’ll find a way to sneak into town and get food there.” They could trade one of their weapons in the slums.

  He stood and kicked some half-rotten leaves back from the flames, clearing a foot-wide perimeter. No sense in risking that their shelter would catch on fire while they slept.

  Security measures taken, he sat back down. “So if the army didn’t send you, who did?”

  “CPRU. Civilian Personnel Recovery Unit. It’s something new the government is trying, offering similar protection to civilians as the army offers to soldiers.” She watched him over the flames as the forest grew dark around them. “How do you think the Venezuelan government found out that you were in Caracas on business?”

  “I came for a vacation.”

  Her forehead furrowed into an impatient frown. “For better or worse, we depend on each other for survival. We need to watch each other’s backs so we can get out of here. This is probably not the best time to start lying to each other.”

  Yeah, maybe not. “I came to see if Danning Enterprises might be able to loosen the chokehold the government has on the local oil industry.”

  “And the National Guard didn’t like it?”

  “Somebody didn’t like it. Barely a handful of people knew what I was doing here.”

  “Who do you think let something slip?”

  “Not the people I was meeting. They wanted this. They contacted me. And they’d get into just as much trouble.”

  “Someone at your company?”

  “Only my brother, mother, and Cesar knew.”

  The fire was fully going at last, just large enough to give them warmth if they sat right next to it, but not so big that it would give them away, although he didn’t think anyone would be looking for them at night.

  The jungle was a dangerous place even when a person could see. Leaches, poisonous plants, parasites, too many poisonous things to step on, too many sharp branches to scratch or cut the skin and start a hell of an infection.

  He’d developed a healthy respect for the rainforest over the past few days. That respect had kept him alive. He could only hope his luck would hold a little while longer.

  He pushed to his feet and used the light of the fire to pile some bamboo leaves on their sleeping platform. He was beginning to get used to roughing it. His bed in the indigenous village hadn’t been much better. “Is life like this when you’re deployed?”

  “Not really. I was Iraq, not Vietnam. Desert. But mostly we slept on the base.”

  The idea of her in danger bothered him. “Were you injured?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you lose any friends?”

  She stared into the fire. “Everybody lost friends.” She paused, then said in a softer voice, “I lost my husband.”

  That had him sitting back down. “You were married.”

  The news hit him harder than it should have. What did he expect, that she would be sitting around all this time, regretting that she’d left him? He hated the sudden jealous streak. It wasn’t like him.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” He watched her from across the fire, understanding now what had put the shadows into her eyes. “When?”

  “Two years ago.”

  He tried to fill in the gaps. “Were you deployed together?”

  “He was in Afghanistan. Both of our tours were just ending. I didn’t reenlist. I wanted to be with my daughter.”

  He stared. “You have a daughter?”

  “Abby.” She closed her eyes. Cleared her throat. “I lost her last year. She was six.” Grief shimmered in the air around her.

  He sat stunned, unsure what to say, trying to process all that she’d revealed in the past few minutes.

  She didn’t wait for him to recover. She pushed to her feet and strode over to their bamboo platform. “We better get some sleep.”

  “Yeah,” he said, because he couldn’t find better words, the last of the anger and resentment he’d held toward her over the years evaporating. He wanted to go after her and gather her against him, except he wasn’t sure if he’d be welcome. It’d been a long time since they’d been friends.

  He waited a few minutes, giving her some privacy, then banked the fire and walked over to the platform, lay down next to her, giving her as much space as he could. Their makeshift bed was fairly narrow, not much more than an inch or two between them as they both lay on their backs, their arms under their heads.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. He couldn’t even imagine that kind of loss. His father had died a couple of years back, but he’d had lung cancer. They’d known for a long time that the end was coming, had time to prepare for it, had a chance to say goodbye.

  She turned on her side, away from him. “Good night.”

  He was good with numbers, angles, engineering principles, business—a lot of things, really. But not with emotions. The strange mix of feelings that swirled inside him threw him off balance. There were things he wanted to say, should have said, but all that came out was, “Good night, Miranda.”

  A bird screeched in the night a few yards away. As a soft rain began to fall, drumming on the palm leaves over their heads, the bugs sought shelter and quieted.

  His body was heavy with fatigue, but despite his exhaustion, Glenn couldn’t sleep. He stayed awake long after Miranda’s breathing evened, after the fire burned down. When the chill of the night crept into their shelter, he moved closer and took her into his arms, spooning her f
rom behind.

  Her army-honed body felt different from what he remembered. He’d loved how she felt back when they’d been lovers, but he couldn’t say he liked the new Miranda any less—all strength and sinuous muscle. He inhaled her familiar scent and acknowledged the testosterone surge her nearness elicited. He considered himself an intellectual, but deep down he was just a Neanderthal whose basic instinct was to comfort her—with sex. Not an appropriate course of action. They hadn’t had a relationship like that for a long time.

  He closed his eyes and for a moment he pretended that she was the old Miranda. His Miranda. He rested his chin on the top of her head, tucking himself around her as tightly as possible. For the moment, he had precious little to give, only his warmth, so he gave that to her.

  Chapter 8

  SO THE NEW Glenn was definitely not like the old Glenn, Miranda thought as she woke in his arms at dawn, pressed against his wide chest, soaking up the heat of his hard body.

  He’d been a nerdy engineering student. Okay, they’d both been pretty socially awkward. She’d had braces. He’d had thick, horned-rimmed glasses. They met in Engineering Principles 101, bonded over receiving the two highest grades at midterms.

  They’d become study buddies first, then lovers after a few months and a lot of awkward kisses and groping sessions in dark corners. It had been the first time for the both of them.

  “Good morning.” His rusty voice in her ear interrupted her trip down memory lane.

  As soon as he pulled away from her and rolled onto his back, she missed his heat. Ridiculous. She didn’t need him. She briskly shoved herself away from the platform. “Fire?”

  He sat up and stretched. “We should dry off.”

  The makeshift roof had kept most of the night rain off them, but their clothes were damp.

  She dragged out the dry wood they’d stored under the platform, then grabbed a couple of cigarettes for tinder and started a fire while Glenn got up and took off his shirt.

  He shook off the leaves that had stuck to it, and a couple of inch-long ants. She brushed off her own shirt, grateful to see that the ants had left her alone. She blew on the fledgling fire, then looked up at him.

  He was stretching with his back to her, his arms above his head as he bent at the waist to the right first, then to the left.

  Holy mother. The new and improved Glenn had a body that could have been in one of those firemen pinup calendars. Impressive cords of muscles flexed under his skin.

  “What do you do?” she blurted.

  He turned, cocking an eyebrow. “I manage the family company.”

  “No, I meant . . .” His sculpted chest distracted her, the faint smattering of hair that started below his bellybutton and led into the pants that were a size too large for him, held up only by what looked like a bamboo rope belt. The waistband sat below his hips and revealed enough for her to know he wasn’t wearing underwear.

  She snapped her gaze back to his. “You look different. Do you do sports?” Back in the day they used to make fun of the hotshot football players. If he told her he’d turned into a jock since, she might just faint into the fire.

  He shrugged. “I swim. The pool is a good place to think. I don’t have to pay much attention, just stay in my lane and keep going.”

  “You didn’t used to be sporty.”

  “The better health, the fewer sick days, the less time away from the company.”

  Of course. All very logical, very much like him. Nothing geeky about his swimmer’s body, though—flat abs, great pecs, wide shoulders.

  He stepped forward. “Are you okay? We should find some food.”

  Her expression was probably off, but not from hunger.

  She looked away from him, tossing another handful of branches on the fire, and the flames grew. He came closer to hold his shirt up to the heat. She shifted forward so her clothes would dry too. She definitely wasn’t stripping.

  The sky was still dim, but the fire provided enough light to illuminate more than the impressive outline of his body. She could do little but stare at the puckered scars that marred his skin, the rows of burn marks along his collarbones.

  She swallowed, anger rising swiftly. “How badly did they hurt you?”

  He shook out his shirt one more time, then shrugged into it, sat across the fire from her. His mouth tightened as he looked toward his feet. “No permanent damage.”

  “What about the burns? I’m sure they still hurt.”

  His expression darkened. “Sometimes the commander smoked cigars. He liked using me for an ashtray.”

  Her stomach clenched. He was half a head taller and nearly twice as wide in the shoulders, yet she felt her protective instincts take over. She’d been a soldier, her job to keep America and Americans safe. She doubted that instinct would ever go away. She wanted to . . . What? Hug him? Maybe.

  She wished she could have come sooner. Her heart twisted at the thought of what he’d been through in the past few weeks.

  She drew a deep breath. Regrets were a waste of time. She was here now. She was going to do whatever it took to get them back to the US safely. She popped to her feet with a new burst of energy. “We should get going.”

  “Right.” He brightened at the prospect of leaving the forest behind. “Let’s do this before the soldiers get all caffeinated.”

  She groaned. “Don’t bring up coffee.”

  “Remember the wickedly strong espresso in the main hall at MIT?”

  She threw a stick at him. “Sadist.” Then she kicked dirt on the fire while he packed up, laughing at her.

  As they moved out, a monkey screeched in the trees above them, so close it startled her.

  Glenn looked up. “Winky?”

  “Who?” She followed his gaze.

  “My old buddy. We were POWs together. He followed me when I escaped.” Glenn grinned. “He goes off, then comes back. I have no idea how he finds me.”

  “He probably thinks you’re part of his tribe.” She shook her head. “He came with you from Guri?”

  “He was caged in the courtyard, target practice for the soldiers. I couldn’t leave him.”

  Okay, that was the Glenn she knew, the one with the big heart. She felt herself softening, so she picked up her pace.

  They walked a full hour, Winky following them, jumping from tree to tree, before they reached the end of the woods. Only a dirt road separated them from the nearest houses, little more than hovels, on the edge of the city. Not a difficult distance, but two guardsmen sat in a military SUV a few hundred feet to their right. Roberto had the city on lockdown.

  Miranda gestured toward the men with her head. Glenn nodded, and they silently retreated a hundred feet.

  “We’ll go around them, then try again in a little while,” she said. The authorities couldn’t have enough people to circle the entire city, could they?

  He followed when she moved on.

  They didn’t talk much. Better not to be overheard if there were soldiers in the woods. And the going required their full attention. They had to watch where they stepped, what they grabbed.

  Since they were moving as quietly as possible, they heard the people up ahead before the people could have heard them. Miranda raised her right hand, her fist in line with her ear.

  Though he’d never been in the military, Glenn seemed to get the signal because he immediately stopped.

  She turned back and mouthed, “Soldiers.”

  Even as he nodded, they heard laughter and a woman’s voice, too faint to make out what she was saying.

  They crept forward slowly, carefully, crouching in the cover of a thick stand of bushes once they reached the path. Twenty or so tourists were walking through the woods, escorted by two guardsmen. The tourists wore backpacks, looking prepared for a full day of hiking.

  “Are you going up in the plane to see An
gel Falls tomorrow?” a tall, aristocratic-looking woman asked in a British accent.

  Her partner, a pudgy, red-headed fellow, shook his head. “I think I’ll stay back at lodgings to download the photos and sort through them a bit.” He was snapping pictures even as he spoke.

  “Do you think the guards are necessary?” the woman asked.

  The man shrugged as he moved on. “They’re worried about the two fugitives the tour guide told us about this morning. Better safe than sorry.”

  The guards trailed behind them, bringing up the rear.

  Miranda flashed Glenn a questioning look. If there were guardsmen with the tourists, then they had to be all over the city. How many National Guards had Roberto called into Santa Elena?

  Her stomach growled. Glenn had to be hungry too. She looked after the small group as they disappeared from sight on the winding path. The nearest food was in those backpacks. And maybe a phone too. If she could call Elaine at the office, they might yet be saved. The general could enter some kind of diplomatic negotiations if he had proof that two US citizens were here under duress.

  She nodded after the tour group and whispered, “Breakfast and phone.”

  Glenn’s lips stretched into a grin.

  God, that grin could do things to her. She swallowed. Could. As in the past. Definitely not now.

  They followed the group at a distance. The monkey screeched now and then, but the sound wasn’t out of place, blending in with birdcalls. Nobody turned back to investigate.

  The tourists fawned over every new plant, snapped photos of every leaf and bug. Miranda kept close to them, but out of sight. At some point, the group would have to stop to eat and relieve themselves, if nothing else. Sooner or later, those backpacks would come off and be set on the ground. And a clever hand reaching out from the bushes might come up with something useful then. She just had to wait.

  So they did, for two full hours, before the boisterous group stopped at last in the middle of a clearing. Backpacks did drop to the ground, but nowhere near where one could be raided.

  The tour guide stood on a stump to gain everyone’s attention.

  “We have the third-highest woody bamboo diversity in Latin America.” He spoke in English with a soft accent, beaming with pride. “About ten genera and sixty species. Among our states, the southern states have the greatest diversity of woody bamboo.”