The soldiers in the reserve platoon were soon at work digging themselves in, and Razor could imagine the surprised looks he and Chris were getting, as they sat there with their backs against a tree. Eventually Gómez could restrain himself no longer. ‘We must dig too,’ he said. ‘If you like, I do all the digging.’
‘We’ll dig our own scrape,’ Razor told him. ‘When there’s enough light to choose the best spot.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Gómez said, and sat down again.
Razor smiled at him absent-mindedly, his mind going back to the last time he had encountered this problem, on a snow-covered slope above the Serb-held village of Vogosca. He and Hajrija – who had then been no more than a beautiful dream – had been ordered to establish a forward observation post above the town. They had spent the last fifteen minutes of darkness cutting tiles of frozen snow for roofing over the yet-to-be-located hide. There was no snow here, but it was cold enough now that they had stopped walking. Ten minutes later the sky was showing its first hint of light, and over the next twenty minutes the two men watched the valley slowly swim into focus. It was only about fifty metres wide at the bottom, and in several places the trees grew right down to the edge of the stream. There were two clearings, both apparently man-made. The larger one, though now overgrown with weeds, had once been cultivated; the smaller contained the ruins of what must have been the cultivator’s shack. From what they could see the path seemed to wind down from the narrow pass some three hundred metres to their left and then hug the side of the stream as it descended the valley.
Cabrera would presumably have his forward units on two sides of the larger clearing, deployed to catch the guerrillas in a lethal crossfire without risk to themselves.
When they were satisfied as to the best point for observation, Razor and Chris swiftly dug out a simple scrape in the shelter of a large bush, covered it with the rain ponchos from their bergens, and added a few pieces of foliage for artistic effect. Once ensconced, they tossed a coin for first watch, and Razor won. Despite the cold and damp he was asleep almost immediately.
Chris took out his binoculars and conducted a more thorough investigation of the terrain above and below them. The Kaibil platoons were hidden in the expected places, but well hidden nevertheless. If the guerrillas came down that path, as they were presumably expected to do, there would certainly be a few bodies for Razor to examine.
Chris turned his field-glasses up the valley to where the path climbed over the pass, almost dreading the thought of catching the approach of distant figures. But there were no humans in sight, only a single large bird – a black vulture, he thought – lazily circling in the air currents above the pass. Anticipating carrion, perhaps.
The day swiftly brightened, and as the sun burned off the clouds the landscape assumed that high-altitude clarity which Chris had first known and loved in the Colombian Andes. It would be a gorgeous day for hiking, he thought, fixing the binoculars on the distant snow-covered peaks which now lay framed in the ‘V’ of the pass to his left. Unless you were a guerrilla, of course, in which case such clarity could easily prove fatal. They would be much more likely to move by night, Chris thought.
So what made Cabrera expect otherwise? Information received, no doubt. But received how? If force had been used then the information was probably worthless.
‘Whatever,’ Chris murmured to himself, just as a bird started singing ‘pur-wheee’ somewhere close by. He started searching with the binoculars for the unknown vocalist, and soon found it – a small bird crouching on a branch some twenty metres away. As he watched, the bird suddenly leapt into flight, displaying white patches in blunt-tipped wings. Chris jotted down the particulars in his notebook and reached into the bergen for his well-thumbed copy of Birds of Costa Rica, wishing someone would hurry up and produce a volume for Guatemala. After a short search he found the bird – a pauraque.
Over the next couple of hours he saw and heard several more of them, albeit with diminishing frequency. The presence of so many humans, no matter how silent their presence, was gradually scaring the birds away. The guerrillas might have reasons for marching in broad daylight, Chris thought, but even the most basic nature awareness would alert them to the unnaturalness of the silence which now pervaded this particular valley.
The morning wore on, and at noon a yawning Razor took charge of the binoculars. For the next ten minutes or so he swept the valley and its surrounds, and reached the same conclusion as his partner – for this ambush to prove successful the guerrillas would need to demonstrate incompetence above and beyond the expected. And nothing in Razor’s recollections of El Espíritu suggested any such level of stupidity.
So today was unlikely to see an end of it. In fact the whole business could drag on for weeks, which wasn’t a very appealing prospect. ‘Join the Army and stare at the same line of trees for eight hours on end,’ he said to himself.
For the next few hours he alternated keeping watch through the binoculars with playing one of his favourite mental games, which involved remembering the plots of famous Hollywood films and then bringing them up to date. Jamie Docherty had invented the game, and there was no doubting its efficiency when it came to consuming stretches of otherwise dead time. Razor spent much of the afternoon recalling the twists and turns of Casablanca before trying, unsuccessfully, to relocate the action in a modern context. Bogart, Bergman and her unbearable goody-goody husband were easy enough, but police chief Louis was a real problem. Razor couldn’t find a current equivalent of the semi-independent Vichy regime in Morocco, and the more he thought about it the more crucial the balance of power between Louis and his Nazi colleague was to the plot. Without it everything else fell apart.
‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ he murmured, and picked up the binoculars again. He checked the pass, shifted his sights along the opposite side of the valley, and found a guerrilla looking at him through a similar pair of long-distance lenses.
The man was dressed in olive-green fatigues and a matching baseball cap. He stared at Razor for a few seconds, then took the glasses away from his eyes, and seemed almost to smile before disappearing abruptly into the foliage. Razor tried to find him again, but failed, and almost began to wonder if he had imagined the sighting.
So much for the ambush, he thought. The next question was whether to report what he had just seen. If he did, he would be actively interfering in someone else’s war, and probably condemning the smiling guerrilla to death and worse. If he didn’t, he could hardly be accused of helping the guerrillas to evade the ambush – they had obviously managed that much on their own.
Unless he saw any sign that the guerrillas were planning their own ambush, Razor decided, he would let the Kaibiles find their own targets.
Some four hundred metres to the north-west, just behind the ridge which separated the site of the intended ambush from the next valley, Tomás was running through the trees, listening for sounds of the chase that must be underway. There was no doubting that the soldier had seen him: Tomás had been wondering who the man was, and had probably kept the glasses on him for too long, creating that sixth-sense awareness of being watched which had led to his own discovery.
The man was probably an American or an Israeli, though he had hardly seemed big enough for one of the former, and much too pale-skinned for one of the latter. Not that it mattered who the bastard was – no gringos who sold their services to the Kaibiles could expect any mercy from the compas.
A minute passed, and Tomás could still detect no signs of a pursuit above the sounds of his own passage. He risked halting his flight for a few seconds, crouching down beside a tree and listening intently while he recovered his breath. There was nothing – no sounds of running feet, no shouts, no baying dogs, no distant drone of helicopters. It was as if the foreigner with the field-glasses had dropped dead with shock at the sight of him.
Tomás started running again, hardly daring to believe his own luck.
When Razor woke Chris at six the sun was
almost gone, the valley below already shrouded in darkness. Lieutenant Gómez’s presence made it impossible for Razor to share the news of his sighting with his SAS partner, but that didn’t seem too much of a problem. He had seen no signs of searchlights among the Kaibiles’ equipment, and assumed they would soon receive word that Cabrera was calling it a day. And a pretty futile one at that.
Another half an hour went by, drawing the night down across the sky. Razor was just wondering how to find out what the hell the Kaibil CO was doing when a scream sounded across the valley, pulling silence after it like a shroud.
‘What the fuck?’ Chris growled.
In the darkness the voices of the nearby Kaibiles were animated, almost exultant.
Another scream rang out, quieter this time, almost animal-like. Maybe it was an animal. Maybe…
A single shot resounded.
‘Ricardo,’ Razor said coldly. ‘What the fuck’s going on down there?’
Gómez spread his hands. ‘I do not know,’ he replied.
‘I think we ought to find out,’ Razor said, getting to his feet and staring down into the murk of the valley.
‘No, I will go,’ Gómez said, a pleading tone in his voice.
Razor looked at him, and then at Chris. ‘OK,’ he agreed.
The liaison officer disappeared down the slope.
‘I wish to God we had a nightscope,’ Razor muttered.
‘We might not like what we see,’ Chris said.
‘No.’
They had been waiting almost a quarter of an hour when Gómez reappeared. ‘We are returning to the base at Uspantan,’ he said, as if that answered all their questions.
‘And the screaming and the shot?’
‘Oh, one of the men walked into a snake that was hanging from a branch. He panicked, but his comrade shot the snake.’ Gómez spewed out the words in a rush, as if eager to get rid of them. And even in the darkness it was obvious that he was strenuously avoiding eye contact.
Two hours later, as they waited on the road for the trucks to return and collect the company, the two Englishmen looked in vain for any sign of the Indian guide.
Hajrija watched Maria Martinez stir three sugars into her coffee and wondered how the girl managed to keep her figure. It was partly sheer youth, she supposed, and partly the non-stop outpouring of nervous energy. Maria was presumably working on the theory that the more she said the more Hajrija would understand, because she had hardly stopped talking in the two hours they had been out together. She was talking now.
‘Más despacio,’ Hajrija told her. More slowly.
Maria grinned and tried again, mixing in some mime for good measure. Eventually Hajrija understood that she was talking about the ruined nunnery which they had just visited, and the small cells where particularly devout nuns had permanently incarcerated themselves, all the better to realize the glory of God.
‘All the life,’ Maria added indignantly in English, as if the nuns had done it just to spite her. ‘No music, no dancing, no sex,’ she said, picking up the chocolate croissant. ‘No life,’ she concluded, biting into it.
Hajrija smiled. It was hard for her to sympathize with the nuns’ self-denial, even when it was being attacked in the name of self-indulgence. Looking at the convent cells, her first thought had been of lives without children.
She wished now she had told Razor about the baby.
He woke up in the barracks room shortly after seven in the morning, and reached out lazily for a wife who wasn’t there. He groaned inwardly and lay there for a while, mulling over the difficult situation he and Chris were in. No clever means of extrication occurred to him.
The trucks had arrived back at the Uspantan base soon after midnight, and the deflated soldiers had been sent straight to their barracks. Razor and Chris had been invited to a post-mortem with drinks, but on impulse Razor had pleaded tiredness. He knew it would be futile to ask about the Indian guide – would, in fact, simply alienate Cabrera – but he was weary enough not to trust his own sense of discretion, particularly with a drink in his hand. In the morning, he had reasoned, he would probably find it easier to keep a cool head.
And, lying there on the bunk, he supposed he did feel more resigned. The anger was still there, but its focus seemed to have shifted, away from bastards like Cabrera and Osorio, and more towards the bastards in Washington and London who had agreed to help them.
There was a stirring in the bunk above, a groan, and the sudden appearance of the familiar face and spiky hair.
‘Just realized where you are?’ Razor asked.
‘Dead right.’
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about – governments seem to be queuing up to pay for your bird-watching expeditions these days.’
‘Not to mention your family holidays,’ Chris retorted.
‘Some holiday.’
Chris lowered himself out of the upper bunk and down to the floor. ‘So let’s go out on the sun terrace and order breakfast.’
‘They never have Weetabix at these posh resorts,’ Razor said, reaching for his trousers.
A couple of minutes later they were walking across the grassy parade ground, enjoying their first taste of another gorgeous day. The blue sky hung above the amphitheatre of mountains, and the sun lit the white church which rose from the centre of the town below. For the twenty seconds it took to reach the canteen, it was possible to believe that those who lived in Guatemala had been blessed.
Once inside, they were served tortilla, rice and refried beans by a smiling adolescent boy. The meal tasted better than it looked, which wasn’t difficult. The accompanying coffee tasted worse, which was.
‘And these are the privileged troops,’ Chris murmured, just as Gómez spotted them from the doorway. The lieutenant hoped they had slept well, that the breakfast wasn’t too bad – a rueful smile, here – and that they would accompany him to the colonel’s office.
This was in the small building next door, and looked very much a temporary affair. The Kaibiles, Razor realized, would be shifted around the country to where they were most needed at any given time. Such a modus operandi would not only make military sense, but also deeply affect the character of the regiment. The life of eternal nomads would both strengthen the regiment’s morale and prevent it from forming any human ties with the people of a particular locality. They were like a praetorian guard, Razor thought, with the families of Zona 14 standing in for an emperor.
Colonel Cabrera was sitting behind his desk, talking to the standing Major Osorio. He greeted the SAS men with a smile, asked the same questions as Gómez concerning their sleep and breakfast, and apologized for what he called ‘yesterday’s fiasco’. Their source of information had proved untrustworthy.
‘So we understood,’ Razor said coldly.
Cabrera chose to ignore the tone. ‘The next operation will be more successful,’ he promised, ‘but it may be a couple of days, perhaps more, before we can move again. Is there anything you need or want?’
Razor looked at Chris, who shook his head. ‘No thanks. I assume it’s safe for us to take a look at the town?’
Cabrera looked surprised for a moment, but quickly recovered. ‘Of course. It is perhaps more sensible to visit in the daylight. Uspantan is a safe town, but there are criminals everywhere. In the daylight they hide. And I’m sure Lieutenant Gómez can find you somewhere good to eat lunch.’
Gómez looked doubtful, but agreed nevertheless.
Walking round Uspantan proved a depressing business. The smiles which had characterized each meeting of eyes in Guatemala’s Plaza Mayor, and the sense of joy which had been so much a part of that evening, were both conspicuous by their absence. As the three men strolled around the streets only the children offered anything other than a cold stare in response to their greetings. Gómez clearly found it hard to understand, and became both angry and apologetic.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Razor told him, wondering as he did so at how little Gómez understood of his own
country. Uspantan was the Falls Road without the graffiti – sullen, resentful, an occupied town.
The largest hotel was apparently owned by a Ladino, but the only staff on display were Indians. They served up a typical comida lunch, which Gómez insisted on paying for. Outside the hotel he hopefully asked the SAS men if they had seen enough.
But Razor had spotted a Guatel office on the other side of the square. ‘I’d like to call Hajrija,’ he told the liaison officer.
‘It will be quicker from the base.’
‘Can’t we do it from over there?’ Razor asked. ‘I don’t like taking up a military line for a personal call,’ he added ingenuously.
Gómez failed to come up with a better reason for refusal. ‘Yes, you can call from there,’ he agreed.
The three men walked across to the tiny office, and began negotiating with the man in charge. Half an hour and several breakdowns later the man achieved what only twenty minutes earlier he had described as impossible, connecting Razor with the Antigua number which Chris had supplied.
He listened to it ring, inwardly praying that she would be there. She was, and for ten minutes they chatted about nothing in particular, simply happy to hear each other’s voice. She was going to Panajachel on the following day, she said, and gave him the name of the hotel at which she was planning to stay. Not trusting the phone, he told her nothing about how their mission was going, save to say that there was no sign of it soon being over.
After hanging up, he paid the operator in quetzals and walked slowly across to where the others were sitting on a bench, feeling surprised, and even a little ashamed, at how much he missed her.
Guatemala – Journey into Evil Page 9