Guatemala – Journey into Evil

by David Monnery

  ‘I suppose not,’ Clarke admitted, though he felt far from sympathetic. Shooting a Guatemalan colonel had obviously not been enough for Wilkinson – he had managed to get himself caught into the bargain. The media would have a bloody field day. ‘I trust that this business will remain under wraps,’ he said.

  ‘If you get your people in Guatemala City moving then maybe it will,’ Davies said. ‘But if my lad gets tortured or killed because somebody fucks up at your end then I’ve no doubt the story will be leaked to every newspaper in Fleet Street.’

  Clarke managed to keep his temper. ‘I don’t respond well to threats, Lieutenant-Colonel,’ he said coldly. ‘And I’m every bit as concerned over Sergeant Wilkinson’s well-being as you are,’ he added, realizing in the process that it was probably true. If the Guatemalans did torture or kill Wilkinson the Opposition in the House would be queuing up to ask the man who had sent him embarrassing questions.

  ‘I will get back to you in an hour or so,’ he told Davies, pressed the disconnecting bar, and punched out another number.

  ‘Get hold of our embassy in Guatemala City,’ he told the man on the Foreign Office night duty desk. ‘Get them to start pushing the locals about one of our nationals they arrested today in a place called Chichicastenango – no, I don’t know how to spell it. His name’s Wilkinson…yes, the soldier they wanted help from. Then get hold of their embassy here and make the usual requests – treatment according to the law, full access, et cetera et cetera. Firm but not aggressive. And don’t talk down to the bastards – they resent it even more than the Arabs…Yes, I’m on my way in now.’

  That at least solved the problem of his wife, he realized, as the limousine accelerated down Rosebery Avenue in the direction of Holborn. He wondered whether his research assistant would be available for overtime on a Saturday night.

  At the Foreign Office he discovered that they had not yet been able to reach the British Embassy in Guatemala City, and that the Guatemalan Ambassador to the Court of St James’s was still being sought among the casinos of Mayfair. ‘Start trying the other EEC embassies,’ Clarke ordered. ‘It’s about time we found a use for the wretched Europeans.’

  When Razor was bundled into the helicopter he more than half expected that the destination would be Guatemala City, where G-2 was probably already furnishing a suite for him in Inquisition-style décor. Contrary to this expectation, the Huey flew south-west for about ten minutes across the jumbled mountains, skirted the western end of a large volcano-surrounded lake, and came down to land in a wide valley flanked with pine forest. Razor briefly noted the approach road winding back in the direction of the lake, walls topped with the familiar glint of his namesake’s wire, and several low barracks buildings. There was only one vehicle in sight, and only a few human figures, uniformed or otherwise. It wasn’t a military camp, he realized, and, despite the guard towers, it didn’t feel like a prison in the usual sense. But it seemed like a very private place, which didn’t seem like very good news.

  Look on the bright side, he told himself, as they bundled him out of the helicopter. They had fastened his wrists behind his back with wire, but other than that, and much to his surprise, no one had laid a hand on him.

  His escort took him down a paved pathway between cinder-block offices, into a one-storey building, and down a long corridor, their boots echoing on the tiled floor. Doors stood open on empty rooms – the place seemed half-abandoned.

  One of the guards yanked on his bound wrists, turning him left and propelling him into one of the rooms. The door slammed shut behind him.

  As hotels went he wouldn’t have given it many stars. Walls and floor were both bare, provided no account was taken of the ominous-looking stains. The only furniture was a plastic bucket, which sat proudly in the river of sunlight streaming in through the single, barred window.

  He sat down in the shade, feeling the gravity of his predicament. And not only his – where the hell was Hajrija, and how would she get out of this God-forsaken country now?

  He should never have gone down to the town, he told himself. He should never have shot the fucking colonel. He should have argued with the bastard, threatened to expose him.

  Cabrera would have killed them both.

  Get a grip, he murmured to himself. Good or bad, it was done. He had to concentrate on what lay ahead, had to prepare himself. It might be presumptuous on his part, but he was expecting to be interrogated before he was shot, or whatever it was that they did to colonel-killers in Guatemala. Give them medals was what they ought to do.

  He supposed the seriousness of his interrogation would depend on how much his interrogators cared about outside opinion, always assuming they didn’t intend disguising the results of their work in something like a car accident. His arrest had been witnessed by several tourists, which might be some help. The problem was, he had a distinct feeling the bastards really were past caring what the world thought. Everyone said they were sadistic psychos, so what did they have to lose by behaving that way?

  Razor had to admit he felt scared. It was natural enough. The trick was not to let the fear take you over. He took his mind back to the interrogation which had been part of the selection procedure when he first joined the SAS: those bastards from the Training Wing screaming at him, while their mates beat the hell out of an old mattress in the next room and tried for an Oscar in groans and whimpers. And he had been scared all right, though not scared enough to crack.

  In the Gulf War some captured members of the Regiment had gone through the real thing, and most of them had managed to hold out. Razor suddenly remembered the ‘fear litany’ from Dune, one of his favourite books as a teenager. He couldn’t recall the actual words, though, or at least only the one line: ‘fear is the mind-killer’. He focused on that sentiment until he felt calmer.

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside, and then the sound of a key in the lock. Osorio appeared in the doorway, and there was another man looking over his shoulder, slender, slightly effeminate, with intelligent eyes. Empty, intelligent eyes.

  ‘Not quite up to English standards,’ Osorio said with a smile, looking round. ‘This is Lieutenant Goicouria,’ he added, introducing the other man. ‘He is an interrogator.’

  ‘Nobody’s perfect.’

  The interrogator didn’t seem to have a sense of humour.

  Razor stifled an imaginary yawn. The first SAS advice when it came to resisting interrogation was to pretend you were more tired than you were. Interrogators hated interrogatees who slipped prematurely into unconsciousness.

  ‘We have some questions for you,’ Osorio said.

  Razor said nothing.

  ‘Where is your partner Martinson?’ Osorio asked, leaning back against the door jamb and lighting a cigarette. Goicouria simply stared – he was apparently not the sort of interrogator who asked questions.

  ‘I hope he is in Mexico by now.’

  ‘By which route was he travelling?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. The guerrillas were taking him.’

  ‘And your wife?’

  ‘What about my wife? Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No, but we think you do. You were supposed to meet her in Chichicastenango. Is that not correct?’

  ‘I was supposed to meet a guerrilla who would take me to her.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Where were you to meet?’

  ‘In the hotel, but I met you instead.’

  Osorio looked at him with amusement. ‘You are lying,’ he said with quiet satisfaction. ‘Your friend tells a very different story.’

  ‘Which friend is that?’

  ‘The friend who accompanied you on your journey to Chichicastenango – the Indian we captured in the square at five this morning. He says your wife is in the town and you know where. Is he lying? If so we will have to try more persuasive forms of questioning.’

  So Tomás was definitely dead, Razor thought. Osorio didn’t even have a name for t
he man he had killed.

  ‘He is lying,’ Razor said. ‘Indian speak with forked tongue,’ he added poetically, and yawned again.

  ‘Have you heard of the capucha?’ Goicouria asked. It was the first time he had spoken, and his voice had a slightly rasping quality to it, like velvet dragged across sandpaper.

  ‘Type of coffee, is it?’

  Osorio dropped the cigarette and carefully ground it out with his polished boot. He then opened the door and called in the two guards who were waiting outside. They pulled Razor unceremoniously to his feet and hustled him out of the door.

  Less than a minute later they were in another room, windowless but twice as large, and with rather more in the way of furniture. There were several upright chairs, one of which was embedded in the bare concrete floor. This one had straps, giving it a superficial resemblance to an electric chair, but the back was open and there were no wires in sight. What looked like a collapsible picnic table stood against one wall, but it seemed lamentably devoid of the ham sandwiches, crisps and jellies Razor remembered from childhood excursions to Epping Forest. In fact, one of the objects on the table looked like a giant condom, and Razor suddenly remembered where he had heard the word capucha.

  They sat him in the anchored chair, and as one of the guards tied his ankles together the other tightened the strap around his waist. A few feet away Goicouria was waiting, the latex hood in his hands, holding it almost lovingly. When the guard was finished with the strap he was told to fetch a bucket of cold water.

  Razor waited, steeling himself for what was to come.

  The guard returned all too quickly with the water.

  ‘This is just a demonstration,’ Goicouria said, stepping forward to force the capucha down over Razor’s head. He then tightened the string around the hood’s neck, cutting off any access to the outside air, and smashed a fist into Razor’s back, forcing him to gulp for whatever air was still inside. The SAS man felt panic rising, and tried to tell himself that they didn’t want him dead.

  It was getting harder and harder to breathe, almost impossible, and his lungs seemed to be tearing themselves apart in the effort to find air. As his chest seemed bound to explode with the pressure he felt his consciousness begin to waver, the pain to recede, and then the hood was pulled from his head, water splashed in his face, and the pain was back, redoubled in intensity as his lungs clawed for the suddenly available oxygen.

  They let him savour the pain for a minute, before Goicouria asked him in a whisper: ‘Where is your wife?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ was Razor’s answering rasp.

  The hood went on again, and again. Four times in all, before the man appeared in the doorway with the message for Osorio which stopped them.

  They half carried him back to the now darkened room, and left him lying on the floor, free to wonder whether he would ever breathe properly again.

  Chris and Emelia set out for the south soon after dusk, following the same path which Razor and Tomás had taken only seventy-two hours before. When the confirmation of her brother’s death had reached the base camp earlier that day Emelia had insisted on making the journey, and a doubtful Old Man had finally agreed to let her go. She was the only Tzutujil-speaker in the camp, and she knew the way. If the Englishman insisted on following his now arrested partner, then there was no one better to guide him. The Old Man only hoped she wasn’t mad enough with grief to throw her life away.

  So did Chris, as much for her sake as his own. He saw the grim set of her mouth, the coldness of eyes that had always seemed so full of warmth, and felt like weeping himself, for her, for her brother, for the whole damn country.

  He wasn’t at all sure he was thinking that clearly himself, but for once in his life he didn’t much care. She needed him, Hajrija needed him, Razor needed him. It seemed enough.

  The practicalities were harder to judge. Hajrija was being smuggled out of Chichicastenango that night, and taken south to a village near Lake Atitlán, where it was hoped they could join her in three nights’ time. There was no word yet on Razor’s whereabouts, but the guerrillas were looking, and so, presumably, was London. Chris hoped to God someone found him before it was too late.

  It was already too late for Tomás, he thought, as he followed Emelia’s diminutive figure down the mountain path. There were no birds singing in the night forest, and even if there had been, he didn’t think she would have heard them.

  In Hereford it was almost midnight, and Barney Davies was beginning to doubt whether Martin Clarke had ever really intended to call him back. Jean’s decision to spend the night at her own home had initially relieved him – he could hardly give her his full attention while all this was going on – but two malts later he was beginning to wonder if he should have been a little more obviously upset that their evening together had been spoiled.

  He poured a third, and carried it across to the sound system, where he inserted a CD of late-thirties Billie Holiday and pressed the Shuffle button. The band swung into ‘I can’t believe that you’re in love with me’, and just as she took up the melody the telephone finally rang.

  ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Davies? Martin Clarke. I haven’t got much to tell you, I’m afraid. The Guatemalan Embassy here has been left in no doubt that we expect Wilkinson to be correctly treated, and we finally managed to get through to our embassy in Guatemala City about an hour ago. They passed on the same message to the Guatemalan Government, who have agreed to let someone from the embassy see your man in the morning.’

  ‘That’s excellent,’ Davies said, feeling more than a little relieved.

  ‘It’s a start,’ Clarke agreed, ‘but don’t expect too much. Our people out there don’t have much hope of Wilkinson being released in the near future. If at all. Shooting colonels is not a very popular pastime.’

  ‘I’m sure he had his reasons.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone. His may seem less than adequate to the Guatemalan Government.’

  ‘I understand that. But when all’s said and done, they were responsible for arranging the whole business. That must count for something, surely?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Clarke said brutally. ‘If you asked a plumber in to fix your washing machine, you’d still be a touch irritated if he murdered your wife.’

  Davies had to admit there was logic to that. ‘So what’s next?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll see what the Ambassador has to say after he’s talked to all the parties concerned. But I have to tell you: we have zero leverage in Guatemala, and the way the Americans are feeling at the moment they would probably volunteer to join the firing squad.’

  ‘It sounds bad.’

  ‘It is. The way things are right now I’d say there’s a better than even chance they’ll put your man on trial and shoot him. Anyway, I’ll let you know the moment there are any fresh developments.’

  Davies sighed and replaced the receiver, just as Billie Holiday started in on ‘Gloomy Sunday’. He sipped at the whisky, wondering what options, if any, were open to him.

  He was breathing almost naturally now, some four hours after the session with the capucha. If it hadn’t been for the interruption the session might still be going on, always assuming he would have survived this long.

  And they said smoking was bad for your lungs! His smile flickered weakly in the dark room, and again he found himself wondering when they would come back for him.

  Think about something else, he told himself. Think about a sunny afternoon at White Hart Lane, preferably in late August, when the perennial dream of winning the League was still precariously intact. Or think about making love in that barge on the Brecon Canal, with the sun going down and…

  No, he didn’t want to think about that. Keep it absurd, like this whole fucking situation. Being tortured by the men the Foreign Office sent him to help. Roaming a country where Lord of the Rings and Dune seemed less like fantasies than the reality did.

  Tomás had known what he was fighting for. And, so far as Guatemala went, Razor supp
osed he did too. His mistake had been finding out when he did, when the only choice lay between a dead colonel and a dead village.

  Well, he was damned if he was going to come here for another holiday, so his Guatemalan political preferences were probably neither here nor there. But what was he fighting for back home? Peace in Northern Ireland? He had no doubts that the Army had once been needed there, but these days peace seemed to be breaking out all on its own. Hong Kong would soon be gone, and there was hardly room to swing a monkey on Gibraltar. Would the Army end up like its Guatemalan counterpart – stranded at home with nowhere else to go, a heavily armed backup for the police, the ultimate muscle for a government which either would not or could not afford fairness?

  He had always thought of the British Army as the best in the world – first equal with the Germans, at any rate – but what did that mean exactly? The best at achieving its objectives? That might be true, but how much was it worth if the objectives were chosen by either idiots or bastards?

  Docherty had been fond of saying that it was hard for a soldier to be better than his orders. But not in this case, Razor thought, because in this case his orders had been total crap.

  12

  The sun would soon be rising on her seventeenth day in Guatemala, Hajrija calculated, keeping her eyes on the compañero who was walking ahead of her. It felt more like seventeen weeks, or even months.

  Still, it felt good to be out in the open again. The four of them had covered something like twenty-five kilometres since darkness fell, most of them along remote trails through seemingly empty mountains. Their one brush with civilization had been crossing the Pan-American Highway, and as they waited above the road for a suitable space in the traffic she had thought the brightly lit trucks seemed like visitors from another planet.

  Since scurrying across the strip of tarmac they had been climbing again, and the path was now angling up towards the last watershed of their journey, a silhouetted ridge-line about a hundred metres above them. They hadn’t stopped for quite a while: her three male companions seemed to have finally accepted that she needed no more rest than they did – this gringa, she would have told them if she spoke their language, had grown up in mountains not unlike their own.