Guatemala – Journey into Evil

by David Monnery

  Or, then again, it might be a hooker. Or his mother.

  ‘Something’s come up,’ the CO was saying. ‘Remember the week you and Docherty spent in Guatemala in 1980?’

  ‘Christ, not very well. I’d only been badged a few months. Why, what’s happened?’

  Davies told Razor exactly what Clarke had told him, and did his best to keep his doubts to himself. Before airing them, he wanted Razor’s reaction. ‘Would you be able to recognize this man?’ he asked, hoping the answer would be no.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t see why not. We spent quite a lot of time with him. Even taught him how to play Cheat.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. He was holding English hostages, and threatening to kill them.’ He paused. ‘Docherty sort of liked him, though,’ he said.

  Davies grunted. ‘Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘What about Chris Martinson?’ Razor asked.

  ‘What about him?’ Davies asked, surprised.

  ‘He’s in Guatemala.’

  ‘He is? I had no idea. What the hell’s he doing there?’

  ‘There’s a town there where you can do Spanish courses and live with a family while you’re doing them. He’s hoping for a field job with one of the charities when his term ends, and he wanted to bring his Spanish up to scratch.’ Razor grunted. ‘And no doubt he’s doing some bird-watching while he’s there.’

  ‘How long has he been gone?’

  ‘Two weeks, two and a half…I’m not sure. I think he’s due back at the end of next week. He had a lot of leave piled up.’

  ‘Ah,’ Davies said, wondering how he could make use of the coincidence. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘sleep on this, and I’ll see you in my office when you get here in the morning.’

  ‘OK, boss,’ Razor said, wondering why the CO sounded so anxious. Maybe he’d forgotten to drop in at Boots on the way home to pick up some condoms. Or maybe he knew more about the situation in Guatemala than Razor did. Which wouldn’t be difficult. He couldn’t remember reading or seeing a single news item about the place in the past fifteen years.

  He did remember the ruins where the negotiations had taken place. The two of them had driven there by jeep along the jungle road from Belize, stayed in a one-room inn which deserved a minus-five-star rating, and met with the terrorist leader on a square of grass surrounded by soaring stone temples. Tikal had been the name of the place. There had been monkeys in the trees, and huge red parrots zooming round in formation like dive-bombers, and those birds with the huge multicoloured beaks whose name he couldn’t remember. Around dawn the mist had lingered in the trees, and one morning he and Docherty had climbed to the top of one of the temples and seen the tops of the others sticking out through the roof of mist like strange islands in a strange ocean.

  He was only twenty-one then, not much more than a kid, and he supposed he hadn’t really appreciated it.

  ‘You OK?’ his mother asked from the living-room doorway.

  ‘Yeah, fine. It’s just one more job that no one else can do.’

  The moon had been gone for several minutes, and the luminous haze above the distant ridge-top was visibly fading. Tomás Xicay could almost feel the sighs of relief as true darkness enveloped the clearing where the compas were taking a ten-minute rest-stop. There was nothing but shadows around him, and the rustle of movement, and the whisper of conversation.

  A hand came down on his shoulder. ‘Is everything OK, Tomás?’

  ‘Sí, Commandante,’ he told the Old Man. He was tireder than tired, but then which of them wasn’t? Except maybe the Old Man himself, who always seemed utterly indefatigable.

  ‘Only a few weeks,’ the Old Man said wryly, and moved on to encourage someone else.

  Tomás smiled to himself in the dark. When, two months earlier, their current strategy had been agreed, that had been the crucial phrase. ‘We must get them on the run, if only for a few weeks,’ the Old Man had told the group leaders gathered that night on the hill outside Chichicastenango. ‘Show the Army and the Americans that we are still alive, and that they are not immune to retribution.’

  What would happen after those ‘few weeks’ no one knew for certain, but there was no doubt that the sort of aggressive tactics they had decided on would have a limited lifespan, because surprise always carried a diminishing return, and without it they would always be outgunned. And they knew that the longer they pursued these tactics the more certain it was that most of them would be killed.

  As the column got back underway Tomás found himself wondering whether the Old Man ever had any doubts, and if so who it was he shared them with. Tomás at least had his sister, though being the man of the family he naturally tried to shield her from his more negative feelings. On his return from the city she had been quick to notice that something had upset him, and he had told her it was just seeing their relations, and the family memories they brought back. That had been true, but it was not the whole truth. During his days in the city he had seen their struggle in a different light, and it had disturbed him.

  This column of compas, striding through the night forest, seemed so full of strength and rightness, so powerful…but there were only forty-four of them, and only the trees and the darkness shielded them, and not 150 kilometres away two million people were getting on with their daily lives oblivious to the guerrillas’ very existence. In the city it was hard to believe that the Government could ever be toppled, that anything could shift the dead-weight of all that had gone before. It all seemed so permanent, so solid. Five hundred years’ worth. And when Tomás thought about how much his people had suffered to keep their world alive, he found it hard to imagine the world of the Ladinos and the Yankees proving any less stubborn.

  Still, no matter how much he might doubt their eventual triumph, he never doubted the need to continue with their struggle. What, after all, was the alternative? To accept the way things were? The poem in Tomás’s pocket had the words for that: ‘…it seems to me that it cannot be, that in this way, we are going nowhere. To survive so has no glory.’

  It had been the Old Man who had introduced him to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, a few months after their first meeting in the Mexican refugee camp. By then they had become firm friends – or perhaps more like father and son – but at the beginning Tomás had found it hard to take the older man seriously. His stories had seemed so outlandish, so much like comic-book adventures, that Tomás had taken him for the camp storyteller, more of an entertainer than a fighter.

  In one story the Old Man had been taking some explosives to the guerrillas in the mountains, when he was stopped at an army roadblock. The soldiers were in a good mood that day, and only gave him a few bruises and burns before telling him he could continue on his way for no more than the price of his sack of beans. Unfortunately this was where he had hidden the explosives, so for an hour or more the Old Man pleaded and whined for the sack’s return. Eventually the lieutenant in charge of the roadblock grew so sick of this incessant lament that he hurled the bag at the Old Man and told him to get lost. His one great achievement in life, the storyteller told his listeners, was not to recoil at the prospect of an explosion as the sack landed at his feet.

  And then there was his favourite escape story. He had been staying with comrades in Guatemala City, and alone in the house when the sound of vehicles approaching at high speed had alerted him. He had walked out into the front yard, picked up a broom and started sweeping, just as the lorries came hurtling down the street. They had screeched to a halt and disgorged running soldiers, all of whom raced straight past the Old Man into the house and started breaking furniture. The lieutenant in charge, who had been sent to arrest a notorious guerrilla leader, told him: ‘Get the fuck out of here, old man!’ He had accordingly shuffled off down the street.

  Both these stories, Tomás had later found out, were true in every detail. The man he had taken for the camp storyteller was probably the most successful guerrilla leader in the history of Guat
emala’s forty-year civil war. And if anyone could ‘get them on the run for a few weeks’, then it was him.

  3

  Barney Davies dropped Jean off at the hospital where she worked, and reached his office before eight, feeling torn between post-coital bliss and pre-mission anxiety. The smile which bubbled up from the one kept fading into the frown caused by the other.

  The briefings on the current situation in Guatemala, which had already been faxed from Whitehall, didn’t do much for the smile. There was a lot of talk about that country’s return to civilian democracy, a few pious generalities about increased respect for human rights, and a lot of waffle about the importance of maintaining stability throughout Central America. According to the Foreign Office mandarins, the existence of a Mayan Indian rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas made it all the more imperative that the alleged progress towards an acceptable peace in Guatemala be sustained.

  Reading between the lines, Davies was not convinced. After finishing the report he stared morosely out of the window for several minutes, and then ordered a second cup of tea and his first rock cake of the day.

  One way of reducing the risks involved in sending Razor into the lion’s den, he had decided, was to send him in with company. The two men had got to know each other during the Bosnian business, and the mere fact that Razor had known that Chris Martinson was in Guatemala suggested at least a minimal level of continuing contact.

  What the Guatemalans would think of it, Davies had no idea. Nor did he much care.

  The tea arrived, together with a surprisingly friable rock cake.

  The seventy-mile drive from Birmingham, most of it on motorways, took Razor about as many minutes. Driving was something he had always done well, and usually faster than this. But as Hajrija had tactfully pointed out, if all the other drivers had his judgement and reflexes then he could get away with driving like a lunatic. Until then…

  He was getting older in more ways than one, Razor thought. Ten, fifteen years earlier, and the prospect of a mission like this would have had his body churning out adrenalin by the pint. His heart would have been leaping at the thought of getting away from Hereford and into action, away from routine and into the unknown. One voice in his brain was still singing this song, but only one, and it sounded more like an echo of his youth than a part of the man he now was. Other voices were dolefully reminding him that these overseas outings only ever looked good in prospect and retrospect, and were rarely anything other than terrifying at the time. This particular mission, so far as he could tell, looked about as inviting as a fortnight in Mogadishu. And on top of everything else he would be away from Hajrija for longer than he cared to think about.

  By the time he reached Stirling Lines Razor was having trouble keeping in contact with the adventurer within.

  Barney Davies greeted him with a wide smile and ordered cups of tea on the intercom. Razor glanced at the photograph frame on the CO’s desk, half expecting to find a new face inside it, but it still contained the familiar picture of his children. In the dim distant past another photograph had featured a wife.

  ‘What exactly do they want me to do?’ Razor asked, once the tea’s arrival had signalled the start of business.

  ‘As far as I know, simply identify the man who calls himself “El Espíritu”, or “The Ghost”.’ Presumably he’ll be in custody by then, though how they intend to catch him without knowing what he looks like seems a moot point.’

  ‘And then?’ Razor asked.

  ‘You come home.’

  Razor grunted. ‘So we have no guarantee that…’ He paused. ‘Well, that they don’t just take him out and have him shot on my say-so.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d want that sort of publicity,’ Davies said carefully.

  Razor looked up, feeling the weight of doubt suddenly bearing down on him. ‘Which might just mean that they’ll wait until I’m on the plane home.’

  Davies shrugged. ‘Maybe. The US State Department told the Foreign Office that if the Guatemalan Army had a hundred suspects they would probably shoot the lot, just to make sure of getting the right man.’

  ‘Bastards,’ Razor murmured, leaving Davies unsure whether he meant the State Department, Foreign Office or Guatemalan Army. Probably all three, he decided.

  ‘Look,’ the CO said, deciding to lay some cards on the table. ‘I don’t like this any more than you do. The Guatemalans are leaning on the Yanks, and they’re leaning on us, and it’s you who’ll pick up the tab…’

  ‘Come back, Docherty, all is forgiven,’ Razor muttered.

  Davies uttered a silent prayer of thanks that Jamie Docherty was now living in Chile, and far removed from this mess. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there’s two ways we can go with this. Either you can refuse outright to go…’ He looked Razor straight in the eye. ‘And if you do I’ll back you all the way.’

  ‘Thanks, boss, but…’

  ‘Or you can go out there and play it by ear. When it comes to the crunch you’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to identify this man or not. By then you should have a much better idea of who and what you’re dealing with. On both sides of the fence.’

  ‘You mean, when the moment comes I just look through the guy with an innocent expression on my face,’ Razor said, amused. ‘I like it.’

  ‘Not necessarily. We know the man kidnapped a whole tour party, and God knows what else he’s got up to in the last fifteen years. He’s no innocent, whatever else he is.’

  ‘He must be pretty old by now,’ Razor said. ‘He looked like a pensioner in 1980.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Davies went on, ‘I’m not sending you out there alone.’

  ‘I was going…’

  ‘Chris Martinson can keep you company.’

  ‘Oh, great. But I was thinking about someone else. The wife has always wanted to see Guatemala for some reason, and…’

  ‘I don’t think…’

  ‘Only as a tourist, of course. She can do her own thing while I bond with the Guatemalan Army. She could maybe open the odd fête, if the Guatemalans ask her.’

  Davies grinned in spite of himself. ‘I don’t know…’

  ‘Maybe it’s only an old Yugoslav custom, but she thinks men on diplomatic missions often take their wives along, with all expenses paid by the grateful hosts.’

  The CO laughed. ‘I can’t wait to hear what the Foreign Office will say,’ he said, reaching for the phone.

  It took five minutes for the secretary to locate Martin Clarke, but far less time for Davies to lose his temper. ‘If you are not prepared to ask the Guatemalans to accept a two-man team then you can go and look for help somewhere else,’ he told Clarke. ‘I am not prepared to send a single soldier, no matter how experienced, into a potential combat situation without any reliable backup.’

  ‘I am not interested in debating the issue,’ Clarke said.

  ‘Then just get on with arranging what I asked for,’ Davies said, and slammed down the phone.

  Razor raised his eyebrows.

  ‘He’ll call back in a few minutes,’ Davies said, with a confidence which he only half felt. It was kind of exhilarating, though, telling one of Her Majesty’s Ministers where to get off.

  And it worked. Clarke was back on the line in less than five minutes, sounding chagrined but humble. The Guatemalans didn’t quite understand the necessity, he said, but they were happy to provide hospitality for as many Britons as came.

  ‘Good,’ Davies said. ‘Please inform them that Sergeant Wilkinson will also be bringing his wife, who is eager to visit their beautiful country. They will need accommodation, and so will Sergeant Martinson. He is already in Guatemala, in Antigua.’ He read out the address. ‘If the relevant authorities can liaise with Martinson, he can meet the Wilkinsons at the airport on Sunday. Oh, and we’ll need a ticket for Mrs Wilkinson on the same flight as her husband.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Clarke asked coldly.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Davies
said, and put the phone down. He looked across at Razor, who was grinning at him, and looking not much more than half his thirty-six years. Davies smiled back, determined not to offer any outward display of the sudden sense of foreboding in his heart.

  The news that the British had agreed to send their soldier reached Guatemala City soon after dawn, and an eager Alvaro was waiting to inform Serrano of the good tidings when the latter arrived at the G-2 offices in the Palacio Nacional.

  ‘Good,’ Serrano said, stirring sugar into the coffee which had just been brought to his desk.

  ‘He will join up with the man in Antigua, the one we knew about,’ Alvaro added. ‘And he is bringing his wife.’

  Serrano was pleased. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘That must mean that no pressure has been put on him. If he is bringing his wife he must be happy to come. He will be a good witness.’

  ‘I thought of putting them in the Pan-American Hotel,’ Alvaro said. ‘Tourists seem to like it.’

  ‘They like it because it is comfortable, but not so luxurious that the streets outside make them feel guilty,’ Serrano said. ‘A good choice,’ he added.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Serrano sipped appreciatively at the dark coffee. ‘Has there been any progress in the business of finding El Espíritu?’ he asked, knowing full well that if there had been he would have been the first to know.

  ‘Nothing definite yet, but the net is being drawn in.’

  Serrano allowed himself a thin smile. ‘Let’s hope the little shit is in it.’

  The sun was sinking behind the twin peaks of Fuego and Acatenango as Chris approached his lodgings. Like most of the houses in Antigua, the Martinez family residence wasn’t much to look at from the outside, offering just a bare wall painted pastel yellow, with two small windows protected by wrought-iron grilles. But once through the gate the visitor found himself in an exquisite courtyard, decorated with palms and flowering pink bougainvillaea, and surrounded by cool, shuttered rooms.