Guatemala – Journey into Evil

by David Monnery

  And they could get out of this, no problem. Three or four days’ bird-watching in the mountains – he might get to see a quetzal after all – and then…

  Chris suddenly came to the realization that Razor had reached several minutes earlier. ‘Christ,’ he murmured softly to himself, just as the sound of voices drifted up from the path below. ‘How much further?’ one of the Kaibiles was loudly complaining in Spanish.

  They clambered unwittingly over the top step, just as the two compas had done, and were still getting their breath back when Razor’s voice told them to lay down their guns.

  One man started to do so, another stood stock-still, the third’s finger clenched on a trigger, sending a spray of bullets into the trees.

  A bullet from Tomás’s rifle knocked him backwards into the other two, his SMG firing a death-rattle at the sky. The two survivors, one with eyes tightly closed, tried not to move a muscle.

  Razor and Tomás stood guard while Chris collected their guns, and the survivors were then escorted, dragging the corpse behind them, up to where Cabrera and the prisoners were laid out in the grass.

  ‘I will go down to the village and tell them what has happened,’ Tomás announced, and was half out of sight before the others had finished nodding their agreement.

  Razor removed his floppy jungle hat and ran a hand through his hair. ‘We need your help,’ he told the Old Man, who raised an eyebrow in wry disbelief. Razor explained about Hajrija, who she was and where she was. ‘The Army knows she’s here, and the moment they find out what happened to Cabrera they’ll go looking for her. I have to warn her, at least give her a chance to get somewhere public, so that people will know if she gets taken…’

  The Old Man thought about it. ‘It will depend on how long the Kaibiles in Uspantan wait before coming to see what has happened. Was there no discussion of contingencies?’

  ‘I’m sure there was, but not while we were around.’

  ‘Well, the nearest telephone is nearly twenty kilometres away,’ the Old Man said. ‘In Pasmolón, at the bottom of the valley. It is a three-hour journey…I don’t think you would get there in time, and maybe not at all – it is an open road.’

  ‘How about their radio?’ Chris suggested.

  ‘Ah, of course.’ The Old Man’s eyes lit up. ‘Tomás is our expert in these things,’ he said, ‘but I see no reason why he cannot call our people. Then they can get a message through to Panajachel.’

  ‘Great,’ Razor said, wondering how long it would be before Tomás came back. ‘Don’t you know the frequencies?’ he asked the Old Man, who shook his head.

  ‘My memory is not so good,’ he said. ‘But Tomás will not be long. Do you know what message you wish to send?’ he asked.

  ‘Christ, no.’ Razor ran a hand through his hair again. Think, he told himself, think.

  ‘Could your people get her from Panajachel to our embassy in Guatemala City?’ Chris interjected.

  The Old Man considered the question. ‘Maybe, but I wouldn’t advise it. If they want her that badly they’ll just go in after her, and, forgive me for saying so, but your Government will not be very popular when this news comes out. It won’t be hard to fake some sort of protest mob.’

  And she was still a Bosnian national, Razor thought. If the embassy wanted to hand her over they had the perfect excuse.

  ‘I think it would be best just to move your wife to a safe place,’ the Old Man said. ‘And to move ourselves to one too,’ he added. ‘Once we have done that we can decide on what the next step should be.’

  Razor could think of nothing better. There was no way he could spirit Hajrija away to complete safety, no matter how desperately he wanted to. ‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘Thanks,’ he added awkwardly.

  ‘I think we should be thanking you,’ the Old Man said, ‘and when we have a few minutes to spare I shall be most interested to hear why you decided to help us. And why you were with the Kaibiles in the first place.’

  ‘Yeah, well…’

  Chris was looking at their four prisoners, two of whom had their faces turned in his direction. They looked like scared boys now, but men in fear of imminent death often did. ‘What are we going to do with them?’ he asked.

  ‘They are Kaibiles,’ the Old Man said, ‘and no doubt all of them are guilty of the torture and rape and murder of our people.’ He grimaced. ‘But no, we do not shoot men in cold blood, not without a trial, and in this instance…I think, with your agreement, we should simply deprive them of their clothes and let them go. Without boots it will take them some five hours to reach Pasmolón, and the gunships will be here long before then.’

  ‘There is another option,’ Chris said, speaking to Razor. ‘I’m not saying I’m in favour, but…’ He shrugged. ‘If we kill these four then there’s no way the Army will know whether we’ve flipped or simply been captured by the guerrillas. In which case they might give us the benefit of the doubt and not go after Hajrija.’

  ‘Shit,’ Razor murmured, and looked at the sky. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘I think the bastards will go looking for Hajrija anyway, and even if we knew for certain that they wouldn’t…’

  The Old Man looked from one man to the other, a rueful smile on his face. ‘So it is decided,’ he said.

  A few moments later Tomás returned with the news that the village was in the throes of evacuation.

  ‘Where will they all go?’ Chris asked.

  Tomás waved an arm. ‘Into the mountains. They will return when the Army has gone, and rebuild the houses. They have done it before.’

  ‘Tomás, we need your help with the radio,’ the Old Man interjected, and explained what was needed.

  ‘Come,’ Tomás said to Razor, picking up the set. ‘We must do this where the Kaibil scum cannot hear us.’

  The two men walked back to the top of the steps, from where they could see the village below. People seemed to be scurrying in every direction, all with their arms full.

  Tomás examined the radio, and pronounced himself satisfied. ‘I have seen these before,’ he said. ‘They are easy. And it is always good to get another radio,’ he added, as if to himself. ‘Now, tell me the message you wish to send.’

  Razor went through it.

  Tomás nodded, extended the antenna and turned the tuning button until the digital display showed the correct frequency. He then pressed the ‘talk’ button on the handset and said in Spanish: ‘Emergency. Emergency. The jaguar has woken from its dream.’

  ‘Tomás,’ a female voice answered almost immediately. ‘What has happened? Is the Old Man all right?’

  ‘Yes, he’s fine. We have had a run-in with the Kaibiles, but there is no time to tell you the whole story. The two gringos Emelia saw, you remember? They helped us…’ He smiled at Razor, who smiled back weakly, and listened to Tomás’s end of the conversation.

  ‘I will explain that later…I am coming to that…One of them has a wife who is staying in Panajachel, at the Cacique Inn Hotel, and she is now in danger…I want you to get hold of the Santa Catarina unit, and ask them to collect her and keep her in a safe place…I was coming to that. There people are to tell her that Hoddle says it’s OK…Hoddle…No, I don’t know what it means. That’s probably the point…We should be back sometime before midnight…OK.’

  Tomás turned to Razor. ‘We have done all we can.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Razor said. ‘Thanks.’ The village below seemed empty now, like a ghost village.

  They walked back up the path to find the prisoners and corpses had been stripped of their clothes and footwear.

  ‘On your feet,’ Chris told them, and they obeyed reluctantly, two of them holding their hands over their genitals like footballers defending against a free kick. ‘Now get out of here,’ Chris told them. Hardly daring to believe their luck, the four men took a few tentative steps forward, then burst into a helter-skelter run down the path.

  ‘What about the villagers?’ Razor asked.

  ‘They won’t be taking the road,’ Tomá
s said. ‘And in any case, those bastards are nothing without their guns.’

  ‘Time to go,’ the Old Man said, looking at his watch.

  Razor looked at his own: it was only just past nine o’clock. A lot had happened since dawn.

  The Indian guide was waiting, his arms full of uniforms, his shoulders crossed with laced-together boots. The two SAS men and two compas carried their own weapons and those of the enemy. The five of them started up the slope, leaving Cabrera and his sergeant face up to the sky, a sumptuous meal for the vultures already circling overhead.

  They had been walking for twenty minutes when Razor remembered the Huey.

  It was not as serious an oversight as it might have been. The naked Kaibiles wasted time searching the empty village for clothes that might have been left behind, and their progress grew noticeably slower as the rough terrain took its toll on their bare feet. Still, it was only three and a half hours after their release that the four men reached the waiting Huey, stumbling into the clearing like escapees from a nudist camp. The two pilots, who had been happily playing cards all morning, managed to restrain themselves from laughing – Kaibiles, naked or not, were not noted for a self-deprecating sense of humour.

  The raw details of what had happened were conveyed over the radio link during the flight back to Uspantan, and Major Osorio was waiting on the tarmac when the Huey touched down. The three men were ordered straight to Colonel Cabrera’s office, where they were obliged to begin delivering a detailed report while still awaiting their replacement uniforms.

  Osorio had no difficulty believing their story. He had never liked or trusted the Englishmen, and the incident of the interrogation had only served to confirm their unreliability. Listening to the four soldiers, he took a perverse pleasure in having been proved right. But this satisfaction faded somewhat when the need to inform G-2 of these developments thrust itself to the front of his mind. Colonel Serrano did not suffer failure gladly.

  Still, it was Cabrera’s failure, not his own. Admittedly he had devised that morning’s operational plan with Cabrera, but no one else knew that. Unless, of course, the colonel had left anything in writing. Another ten minutes was wasted while Osorio made sure he had not. It was almost twenty to two when the two Chinooks lifted themselves ponderously into the sky above the base, and headed up across the mountains towards the village of Tziaca. During the flight Osorio rehearsed what he would say to Serrano when the time came.

  The village was empty, of course. While most of the company began torching the houses, the four men who had been in Cabrera’s party that morning led Osorio and a platoon of Kaibiles up the path behind the village. As they clambered cautiously up the last steps beside the waterfall, their eyes caught sight of the large birds perched on the bodies thirty metres up the path. When they walked forward the vultures flapped their wings in annoyance, and then took to the air, hovering in hope overhead.

  The faces were still just about recognizable.

  They carried the two bodies back down to the village, the vultures shadowing their journey. As the two bodies were loaded into one of the Chinooks Cabrera’s head lolled sideways, and the ruined eyes seemed to reach out for one last look at the scene of their undoing. Osorio turned away in distaste and wondered what to do next.

  Find them, he told himself.

  He unfolded his map and spread it across the cockpit floor of the Huey, inviting the pilots to look at it with him. It didn’t take a genius to work out which way they must have gone.

  He looked at his watch. ‘A little more than six hours,’ he said. Those Indians could walk all right, but they had the Englishmen to consider. ‘Let’s say eight kilometres an hour. That’s a maximum of fifty kilometres.’ He drew an appropriate arc on the map. ‘Start on this line and then follow concentric arcs back in this direction. Don’t try and engage them. If you make contact, call in and hang with them. We’ll join you in the Chinooks.’

  The pilots nodded. They didn’t seem very optimistic, Osorio thought.

  Moments later he watched the Huey take off through the cloud of smoke which now hung above the burning village.

  It was slightly after four o’clock when Colonel Serrano finally became aware of the morning’s events on the path above Tziaca. His first instinct was to rage at Osorio – Cabrera being no longer available – but he knew in his heart that neither officer was really to blame. He should save his anger for the two Englishmen – them and all the other gringo bastards.

  He listened as Osorio outlined the current state of play, and approved the measures the major had already taken: the setting in motion of the manhunt, the general tightening of security throughout Quiche, Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz.

  How dare they, Serrano thought as he hung up. His blood boiled at the arrogance of these people. He reached for a Pall Mall to calm himself, and stood at the window for several minutes, taking deep drags on the cigarette as he stared vacantly out across the inner courtyard of the Palacio Nacional.

  One dead colonel of the Kaibiles was not the end of the world, he decided eventually. He hadn’t even liked Cabrera very much – the man had been too transparently ambitious. Probably trying to compensate for the Indian ancestry implicit in his dark complexion.

  Serrano flicked a wrist, as if he was dispatching Cabrera’s spirit into the next world. He needed to concentrate on two imperatives: first, limiting any potential damage, and second, turning the situation to his own advantage.

  The first thing was to keep the matter quiet, at least for the time it took to net the two Englishmen. It was conceivable that they would need help from the English authorities in recapturing the renegades, but that wouldn’t be a problem – the government in London would be as keen to keep this business out of the public eye as he was. And it would be enjoyable to pass on the news to them, Serrano decided, if only to hear the bastards squirm.

  Of course, once the men were caught all bets would be off. Then their fate could serve as an example to all the foreigners who tried to interfere in the nation’s affairs. They had shot a Guatemalan officer in the performance of his duty, shot him down like a dog. They would be tried and then executed, all according to the law, offering both proof of Guatemala’s devotion to legality and an example of what happened to those who took up arms against the state.

  But first they had to catch the bastards. Or persuade them to give themselves up. The wife, Serrano thought. He reached for the phone which connected him with the Department of Criminal Investigation offices a kilometre to the south.

  She had committed no crime, but in the circumstances no one could object to the police pulling her in for questioning.

  He was put through to Vincenzo. ‘The wife of the Englishman,’ he asked without preamble. ‘Is she still under surveillance?’

  ‘Not around the clock,’ the DCI man said, sounding surprised. ‘She is staying in Panajachel…’

  ‘Pick her up,’ Serrano said. ‘Immediately. And bring her to the Palacio Nacional.’ He hung up while Vincenzo was still speaking, and lit another cigarette from the previous one.

  The Americans would be upset by all this, he thought. Upset with the English, but maybe also feeling a little responsible themselves. There were possibilities here.

  The party of five had been walking for several hours, sometimes through forest but mostly across lightly wooded slopes. In these foothills the signs of human habitation were few and far between: traces of a path, an abandoned farmstead, a hamlet in a valley far below. The mountains marched to their left, climbing into a perfect blue sky.

  The two Englishmen had not slept for twenty-eight hours, and were beginning to feel the pace. In another two hours it would be dark, Razor calculated, and then maybe they could take a rest. On the path behind him Chris had just seen his third sharp-shinned hawk of the day, its primary feathers splaying like human fingers as it soared.

  They were halfway across a long, bare slope when the distant drone of a helicopter insinuated itself into their consciousne
ss. A few stunted bushes offered the only cover, and these were a hundred metres away.

  Everyone froze, their eyes searching unsuccessfully for the approaching craft. Their ears told them there was only one, and a small one at that.

  ‘Recon,’ Razor murmured, trying to get his tired brain to work.

  The Old Man was pulling maroon Kaibil berets out of each trouser pocket. ‘We’ll have to bluff it,’ he said, throwing them to the SAS men. ‘Your uniforms look like theirs. We’ll play dead. You call them in, get them within range.’

  Before the Englishmen could reply, the three Indians were splayed corpse-like in the grass. Seconds later the Huey loomed up over the ridge about half a kilometre in front of them.

  There was no way it could miss them.

  Razor and Chris jammed the maroon berets on their heads and started waving wildly. Both men felt more than a little foolish. There was no way a stunt like this could work. The helicopter had seen them now, and was slowing as it approached. As the two men redoubled their efforts, they found they were laughing, and started to jump up and down, shouting abuse at the helicopter.

  It was veering to their left now, but still getting closer, and they could see the two crewmen sitting next to each other in the cockpit. Neither of them seemed to be making the head movements that usually went with talking.

  The range dropped to about two hundred metres, still fifty in excess of the Uzi’s effective range. Razor imperiously gestured for the pilot to land.

  It inched closer, like a predator uncertain of its prey. There was a movement in the cockpit, maybe a microphone being picked up.

  Maybe 170 metres.

  ‘Now,’ Razor decided, and both men swung the Uzis into position, took aim, opened fire.

  The helicopter jerked away, like a horse’s head responding to a pull on the bridle, and at almost the same moment both crewmen jerked back in their seats.

  The Huey hung suspended in mid-air for a long moment, then seemed to drop like a championship diver, twisting to strike the ground head first. The hillside exploded in flame.