Guatemala – Journey into Evil

by David Monnery

  The first rap on the door was so light that Hajrija dismissed it as the wind. The second got her up off the bed on which she had been reading the Mayan ‘Bible’, the Popul Vuh.

  The girl was dressed in a mostly red traditional costume, and her wares were hung round both neck and wrists. She looked slightly older than most of her fellow-hawkers.

  So now they were making house calls, Hajrija thought, and was just opening her mouth to send the unwelcome visitor on her way when the girl ducked under her arm and into the room. ‘Hey,’ Hajrija said, more than a little annoyed. She now saw that the girl was older than she had thought, more like sixteen than thirteen.

  She was fishing a piece of paper from the waist of her skirt and holding it out for Hajrija.

  Another hard luck story, Hajrija thought. In Antigua several young men had approached her with requests for help with their education costs, offering beautifully printed references from some unknown college as proof of their genuineness.

  She took the piece of paper and gave it a cursory look. The words ‘FOLO ROSA’ were printed in large untidy letters. ‘TRUBAL YOU. HODAL SAY OKEY,’ it went on.

  ‘I Rosa,’ the girl said. She pointed at the door, which was still open. ‘Vamos,’ she added hopefully.

  Hajrija looked at the letter again. ‘FOLO’ was follow. ‘TRUBAL’ must be trouble. Who was ‘HODAL’?

  What the hell was this?

  Hoddle, she thought. Razor’s hero. Almost the first thing he had shown her in England was his video clip of Hoddle’s goal against Nottingham Forest. What a romantic.

  But if this was from Razor…

  A car door slammed, and she realized she had just heard it arrive in the hotel’s small parking lot.

  The girl was tugging at her sleeve. ‘With me,’ she said, ‘with me.’

  Hoddle said it was OK. She grabbed the travel pouch with her money and passport from the other bed and followed Rosa out of the door. The girl made a locking mime with her arm, causing the parrot necklaces on her wrist to jingle.

  Hajrija locked the door, and the two of them advanced cautiously down the first-floor veranda towards the stairs. From the bend in the latter they could see two men walking around the edge of the brightly lit blue swimming pool, heading in their direction.

  Rosa tugged on Hajrija’s sleeve again, pulling her down the last flight of steps and then into the shadows beneath them. Seconds later they listened to the two men mount the stairway.

  Again the tug, and Hajrija was following the girl through the dark hotel garden, past the empty car and out through the gates. They turned left down the road that led to the lake, making the most of the deepest shadow they could find, ears straining for sounds of a car behind them.

  The thought crossed Hajrija’s mind that this was some elaborate plot to rob her, and was quickly dismissed.

  They reached the rickety jetty which she had visited the night before. A crescent moon was rising in the east, but was yet to cast its light on the lake, which stretched away like a sheet of dark glass towards the looming volcanoes. A small boat was being held against the jetty by a squatting Indian. He and Rosa started talking in one of the native languages, and even though Hajrija didn’t understand a word, she knew the news wasn’t good.

  ‘No boat,’ Rosa told her, accompanying the information with the familiar tug on the arm.

  They left the man crouching on the jetty, and turned back up the road towards the hotel. Before Hajrija could question the wisdom of this direction Rosa had pulled her off through a hedge and started across what looked like an overgrown sports field. Away in the distance they could see the lights of vehicles descending the switchback road from Sololá.

  They clambered across several fences in the dark, and emerged in the backyard of a family house. A man looked up from the back steps, and when Rosa said something to him he simply gestured them on with a wave of his cigarette.

  At the end of a dark lane they reached the bottom of the Sololá road, just as an Army truck full of soldiers rumbled past them and into Panajachel. Surely, Hajrija thought, this couldn’t all be on her account. What could Razor have done – mounted a coup all on his own?

  Rosa held them there in the shadows until the highway was clear, then scuttled across, nimbly scaled the fence on the other side, and set out across what seemed like a row of backyards. For the next fifteen minutes they worked their way around the outskirts of the large village, the cliffs which lay behind it looming to their left, the lights and sounds of evening life stretching off towards the distant lake on their right.

  Hajrija guessed that they were now close to the old part of the village, and a few minutes later she gained a glimpse of the church she had visited on her first evening there. The house they were making for turned out to be in one of the small streets nearby.

  Their arrival produced a storm of conversation, in which anxiety and excitement seemed present in roughly equal quantities. There were two men, two women and an ever-changing gallery of children in the small back room, and all but one of the men was wearing traditional dress. After both mime and Spanish had been tried with a similar lack of success the man in modern clothes was dispatched in search of someone who spoke English, leaving those left behind to smile at each other.

  The man who eventually arrived told her his name was Mariano. He spoke good English, and swiftly translated the news which had arrived from the north. Her husband, he explained, had gone with the compañeros, and the Army was looking for her to use as a hostage. Panajachel was now full of soldiers, in the hotels and on the roads and out on the lake. But she would be safe in this house, at least for one night.

  At this point one of the women came across to Hajrija and carefully loosened her hair from under the woven headscarf she had bought that morning. ‘Look at this,’ she seemed to say to the others, before suggesting something which had everyone clapping with amusement and excitement.

  The bad news reached the Foreign Ministry, via the British Embassy in Guatemala City, soon after midnight GMT. Martin Clarke was in his Westminster flat, having just persuaded his research assistant that they could finish their work on Atlantic fisheries law in bed, when the call from the duty officer came through. His irritation at being disturbed – it had taken four months to get the green light from this latest research assistant – was only made worse by the nature of the news.

  He gathered together the clothes which he had so recently scattered, dressed, and walked swiftly through the wet streets to the Foreign Office. The Embassy report was waiting on his desk, short but to the point. The two SAS troopers sent to Guatemala to assist in an anti-terrorist operation had apparently gone off their heads, first killing the Guatemalan colonel in charge of the operation, and then defecting to the terrorists.

  Clarke sat back in his chair, massaging his forehead with his fingers, and feeling the dull ache in his unrequited balls. The Guatemalans would be hopping mad, he thought. The Americans would be furious. He was furious. How the hell was Britain supposed to sell its Army as the international community’s mercenaries of choice when something like this happened?

  If this news spread, every government in Latin America would be crying out for the blood of these men, and if they didn’t get it then few of them would be falling over themselves to buy British for years to come. And if these two men were sacrificed then every liberal inside and outside the House would be dubbing the Government the friend of the torturers. Whichever way it went, the political outlook seemed bleak.

  The fucking SAS, he thought. He would cheerfully have the whole damn lot disbanded. Who could afford a regiment that was a law unto itself? How many times, after all, did London embassies get taken over by terrorists?

  Calm down, he told himself. There was no certainty as yet that this news would get out. The Guatemalans might be willing to trade silence for co-operation, since this was not likely to be very good publicity for them either. And as for the two SAS men – well, if they had gone berserk then that was their
problem. The Government had no power to save them, even if it wished to. The rule of law was the rule of law.

  Clarke reached for the phone, thinking that there was at least some compensation in the news – he would enjoy sharing it with the SAS CO who had treated him so rudely less than two weeks before.

  Barney Davies shivered as he listened to Clarke’s account of the previous day’s events. He had left Jean in bed and come out to the living-room phone, but had neglected to collect his dressing-gown on the way. Whisky, he thought, pulling the phone cord after him, balancing the receiver between ear and shoulder, and reaching for the bottle.

  ‘What do you mean, we’re accepting their story?’ was his first response.

  ‘Because we have no reason as yet to doubt it. They have the colonel’s dead body and several eyewitnesses to Wilkinson shooting him in cold blood.’

  Davies took a gulp of the malt and told himself to keep his temper under control. ‘The reason I have to doubt it,’ he said calmly, ‘is my knowledge of these two men. Guatemalan Army witnesses are hardly likely to be reliable. And if, if, Wilkinson did shoot the colonel then he would have had a damn good reason.’

  ‘What possible reason could he have had?’

  ‘I don’t know. These people are animals,’ he added, and wished he hadn’t.

  ‘That would be your diplomatic reply, would it?’ Clarke asked scathingly.

  ‘No, it would not. Can you fax me all the information you have?’ Davies asked.

  ‘Of course. But I’m not sure what we can do for these two men, Lieutenant-Colonel.’

  Davies bit his tongue – this was not the time to push Clarke, who sounded as angry as he was. ‘What about Wilkinson’s wife?’ he asked. ‘Do we know where she is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is the embassy looking for her?’

  ‘She is not an English national,’ Clarke said coldly, ‘so the answer is probably no. I will talk to you again in the morning.’ Then he hung up.

  Davies stood in the middle of his darkened living room, a naked man clutching a glass of whisky. ‘Shit,’ he muttered.

  9

  Less than two hours of daylight remained after the downing of the Huey, but it felt like six. If the helicopter crew had managed to get off a sighting report then the two Chinooks would be on their way, carrying eighty Kaibiles hungry to avenge their colonel. The five men marched on, climbing ever higher into the mountains, ears pricked for the swelling drone of rotor blades.

  But at last the sun sank behind the mountains on their left, throwing the slopes the party was traversing into deepening shadow. They had apparently been granted a twelve-hour respite from discovery and probable death.

  Another hour brought them to a wooded valley high on the eastern flank of the Cuchumatanes, and here they found the fourteen-strong unit which Tomás and the Old Man had left two days earlier. As they walked into the lightless camp the two SAS men were conscious of the curious looks they were getting from the guerrillas, though one compañera seemed much more interested in hugging the returning Tomás than noticing them. It was the young woman from the ravine, Chris realized.

  He noticed that there were a lot of women in the camp. Almost as many women as men, in fact. And they were wearing the same olive-green uniforms.

  ‘Will they have any news of my wife?’ Razor asked the Old Man.

  ‘No, the message went to our base camp, not here. This is just a transit camp we use sometimes. And this is only a quarter of our company,’ he added. ‘You will see the rest – and get some news, I hope – when we reach the base camp.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘It is a seven-hour march, so we shall leave at around eleven. Until then, you should get some sleep.’

  The SAS men needed no second bidding. Oblivious to the stares of the guerrillas, they found a flat piece of ground to lie down on, and were soon sleeping the sleep of the just.

  According to Razor’s watch it was just after ten-thirty when a hand gently shook his shoulder, and the lovely face of the girl who had welcomed Tomás home smiled down at him. ‘El Jefe wants to see you,’ she said in Spanish, speaking slowly as if she wanted to be certain of getting it right.

  ‘OK,’ Razor said.

  ‘She’s nice,’ Chris observed, watching her walk away. A waxing crescent moon had risen while they were asleep, and visibility had increased dramatically.

  ‘Down, boy,’ Razor replied. ‘I think she belongs to someone else. And I don’t think we can afford to piss anyone off for the next couple of days.’

  ‘I just said she was nice.’

  ‘Right,’ Razor said sardonically, getting to his feet and looking round. The sky was strewn with clouds, but there were large stretches of open sky, black and sequinned with stars. ‘Do you remember those ads on TV about joining the Army and seeing the world? Well, I’m afraid it looks like they were true.’

  Chris grinned at him. ‘Let’s go and ask El Jefe to send us home.’

  It wasn’t just the Old Man who wanted to see them – it was the whole unit. Not surprisingly, they all wanted to know what the two Englishmen had been doing with the Kaibiles.

  Razor started the story at the beginning, conscious of all the pale faces gathered around him. Almost immediately several people began whispering, and for a moment he thought they must be hostile. But then he realized: the whisperers were translating his Spanish into another language, or even several of them.

  He told the assembled guerrillas what their orders had been, and the doubts they had harboured, and how they had left the decision as to whether they would identify the Old Man until the time came. He talked about seeing Tomás through the binoculars at the site of the abortive ambush – this brought a laugh – and their encounter with Emelia in the ravine after the guerrillas’ highly successful ambush.

  ‘We watched the village for about four hours that morning,’ Razor said, ‘and I decided I was not going to identify you. But…’

  ‘I identified myself,’ the Old Man said, ruefully shaking his head.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And why did you kill the Kaibil colonel?’

  Razor shrugged. ‘It was him or the village. Not a difficult choice.’

  The Old Man looked at him, seemed about to say something, and just smiled instead. ‘Is everyone satisfied?’ he asked the company. There seemed to be general assent. ‘So we will help them on their way to the border?’

  A woman said something in one of the native languages which made everyone laugh.

  ‘Alicia says it would make more sense to keep you with us.’

  ‘We are grateful for your help,’ Razor said diplomatically, thinking that a man could do a lot worse with his life than join these people.

  Ten minutes later the unit was setting off once more. They were heading south-west, crossing over from the eastern to the western side of the main Cuchumatanes range, Tomás had told the two Englishmen. On a night like this, he had added, it would be cold but beautiful.

  They began by climbing in single file out of one high valley and into another. In Guatemala they always seemed to be climbing, Chris thought. The country was like an inverted egg-timer – when you got to the top they turned it upside down and you found yourself at the bottom again, facing yet another ascent.

  But he wasn’t complaining. He felt the way he had during the second half of the Bosnian mission, both heightened and torn. A heady mix of excitement and elation had accompanied him on every wilderness journey from boyhood on, and a loud echo of this was still leaping through his veins. But now it had a permanent accompaniment, almost a counterbalance. As long as he was in the SAS, this sense of elation would be tangled up in death.

  He thought about the crew of the Huey, remembering their faces. He had shared a joke with one of them on the tarmac at Uspantan. They might not have been married, might not have had children, but at the very least they would have had parents, siblings, friends.

  And their lives had been so easy to tak
e. A burst on a trigger and they were gone. Just a few seconds to wonder what they would be missing, to grasp for the crucifix which had dangled in front of them on the Huey’s windscreen.

  Chris did not regret killing them; the choice had been clear – the lives of the helicopter crew or the lives of the five men they were seeking. But he did feel as if he had faced more than enough choices like that for a single lifetime. He wanted a chance to choose between life and death, not between one person’s death and another’s.

  This was the last mission, he thought, and almost burst out laughing. After this one, the chances of the SAS sending him or Razor on another seemed pretty slim. Always assuming they survived.

  A few paces behind him, Razor was worrying more about Hajrija’s survival than his own. He cursed himself for putting her into such danger, even as he knew in his heart that there was nothing else he could have done, and nothing she would rather he had done.

  So why worry? he asked himself. Because he loved her, that was why, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her falling into the bastards’ hands. Couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

  He had never felt like this before, or at least not since he was a little boy. Then he had been frightened when his mum was late coming home, and his mind would run through all the terrible things that could have happened to her and how he would be left alone and have to go and live with his loony grandmother in her dark flat in Hoxton.

  And he wondered how he could have served with so many men who had wives and never have realized how much harder it was to risk your life when someone else needed you to come home.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ the Prime Minister said wearily. It was just after eight in the morning, and the day was already sliding downhill. ‘Two members of the SAS…’

  ‘The two advisers we sent to Guatemala,’ Martin Clarke added helpfully.

  ‘The two advisers the Ministry of Defence sent to Guatemala,’ the PM corrected him. ‘You’re seriously telling me that they’ve joined up with communist guerrillas? It doesn’t make sense. I know the SAS have a reputation for going their own way, but that’s ridiculous.’