Guatemala – Journey into Evil

by David Monnery

  Leaving Hajrija to look after the men in the helicopter, Razor was on his way back to Emelia when the sound of running feet stopped him in his tracks. He stepped into the deeper shadows just as the unmistakable silhouette of his SAS partner jogged around the corner of the building.

  Razor blew a single low whistle, and stepped back out of the shadows. The two men shook hands and grinned at each other. Razor led Chris back into the building, explaining the situation as they walked.

  ‘I’ll go with Emelia,’ Chris said.

  They walked back down the corridor to the Interrogation Room, where Emelia was holding a gun on Goicouria as she tried to comfort his latest victim. ‘His name is Salvador,’ she told them.

  Razor took charge of men and Uzi. ‘Go and fetch the others,’ he told Chris and Emelia.

  As they hurried away down the corridor he half dragged the torturer out of the building and across the tarmac, gave him over to Hajrija’s loving care, and then went back for Salvador. As he was being carried to the helicopter the tortured man spoke softly and continuously in a language Razor didn’t understand.

  He gently lowered the man to the floor of the passenger hatch and stood with Hajrija beside the rattling helicopter, her eyes and gun covering the men inside, his looking out across the still oblivious base. He could feel her tension, and could hardly believe how little he was feeling himself. By any objective standards this was a dangerous situation, and yet he felt no sense of danger.

  He supposed it was hard to sound a real alarm in a place like this, where screams in the night were part of the aural furniture. Every man on the base would have heard the helicopter – could still hear it – but all of them would be assuming it was someone else’s business. G-2’s more than likely, and who would want to stick his nose into that?

  They would probably have to set off fireworks and start singing ‘God Save the Queen’ before anyone came to investigate. In places like this people followed orders, and the only man who could give them was lying unconscious in the helicopter behind him.

  Still, it was possible to have too much of a good thing. It was probably time to go.

  On cue, three figures walked unsteadily out of the distant doorway, Chris and Emelia behind them. Razor turned to the open hatch and ordered the pilot out.

  The man sullenly obeyed.

  ‘How much fuel do you have?’ Razor asked him, as Chris appeared at his shoulder.

  ‘Almost a full tank.’

  ‘Good. Now my friend here says he knows how to fly one of these, but what he means is he knows how to fly them through a bright blue English sky. Guatemala in the dark may be a little advanced for him, you get me?’

  Chris smiled inanely.

  ‘Well, that gives you two choices,’ Razor told the pilot. ‘One, you can sit in the back with the rest of us and pray, or two, you can fly us where we want to go. Of course, if you choose to be our pilot you’ll have to come all the way to Mexico with us, whereas if you opt for economy class we shall have to leave you with the guerrillas.’

  The man swallowed once. ‘I am your pilot.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  Not much more than a minute later the helicopter was lifting off. As it veered towards the north the only movement in the camp beneath came from the guard in the north-western watch-tower, who seemed to be waving them goodbye.

  In the co-pilot’s seat Chris was studying the map, and feeling unreasonably disappointed that there was enough fuel for them to reach Mexico. There would be no need to take to the mountains once more, no need of more help from the guerrillas, no reason for he and Emelia to spend any more time together. She and the rescued prisoners would be dropped off at the camp in the Cuchumatanes, along with Osorio and his torturer. They would say goodbye, and that would be that. He would never see her again.

  ‘My brother is in Mexico,’ the pilot said suddenly. ‘He says Guatemala is fucked.’

  ‘He’s probably right,’ Chris agreed. But it would also be blessed as long as there were people like her.

  In the passenger hatch behind him Razor had securely trussed Osorio and Goicouria, and was now sitting with an arm round his wife, watching Emelia supervise the doctor in his examination of the rescued prisoners. He could not understand a word any of the latter were saying, but there was no mistaking the joy and relief of their liberation.

  He felt pretty relieved himself. ‘Thanks for coming to pick me up,’ he murmured to Hajrija, as if she had just collected him from Hereford station.

  She turned to look at him, a smile on her face. ‘I didn’t want to raise a daughter on my own,’ she told him.

  Epilogue

  Chris parked his Escort by the side of the track, and the three of them clambered out into the mist. The flat crown of the mountain was hidden from view, about four hundred metres above them, a full morning’s walk. They started up the path, Chris in the lead, Hajrija behind him, a plastic bag knotted to her belt. Razor brought up the rear.

  More than two weeks had passed since their helicopter had touched down on Mexican soil, but in the intervening period all three of them had come to realize that Guatemala was not an easy place to leave behind.

  To all outward appearances Chris had settled back into his routine as an SAS instructor, content to see out the weeks which still remained before his official departure from Regiment and Army. He had resumed his helicopter flying lessons and filled out applications for several charity and aid-agency jobs, at least one of which he expected to be offered.

  The fact that he found his existence in England flat, safe, almost lifeless, he mostly kept to himself.

  Climbing the misty path, he thought about her, as he often did. He wondered what had happened between them, and found that the conventional words seemed even more inadequate than usual. Had he been in love with her? They had known each other only a few days, and yet…He smiled at the cliché and yet still felt the power of what it expressed.

  He knew he couldn’t have stayed, knew she couldn’t have left. He accepted it. He had always been good at accepting things, maybe too good. He saw her face frequently in his mind, and every time he heard a bird sing he could see her listening, the way she had that first day in the forest.

  Now that the fear of losing Razor had faded, Hajrija’s memory was filled with all the people who had helped her – the girl and her family in Panajachel, the old couple and Lara in Chichicastenango, Mariano and the compas on the volcano. She had never known such spontaneous friendliness, such a willingness to greet with a smile, such warmth and simple goodness. England had never seemed a friendly place to her, and since their return it had seemed even less so. Now she thought she could detect bitterness behind the coldness, as if the people here sensed that they were missing out on something but didn’t quite know what.

  She wanted to write something about Guatemala, but what? That being oppressed seemed to be good for the soul? That war was? Was that why she had left Bosnia for England?

  As she climbed the path it occurred to her that in previous centuries she could have stumbled on a dead village in these Welsh hills. Not so many centuries had gone by since the English ruling class sent its armies on genocidal rampages through the lands of subservient ethnic groups. But here in 1995 the only bodies they might find would be those of sheep, and the only helicopter gunships looming out of the mist would belong to the army her husband had served for nearly twenty years.

  Their baby would grow in peace, in safety. It wouldn’t live a life of endless struggle and hardship, wouldn’t suffer from malnutrition or have its stomach ripped open by the bayonets of crazed soldiers. All of which was good, and she was grateful for it. But never again would she mistake it for everything.

  It was only two months, but already she seemed to be walking differently, Razor thought. Or maybe he was imagining it. He wondered if she should be making this climb, and knew she would only laugh at him if he mentioned it again.

  He had a wonderful wife, and he was going to be a father. T
he rest ought to take care of itself.

  But it never did. He wasn’t sure if the last month had changed his life, or if it had just set the seal on a process which had been going on for years. His mum had always said that people only understood things when they were ready to. And according to his wife, whose Yugoslav education had included compulsory lessons in Marxist ideology, the old bugger himself had said that problems only become apparent when their solutions become available. Or something like that.

  He kept seeing Tomás’s questioning face in the dusk, asking him what he was a soldier for.

  Barney Davies had been wonderful, but he was only the man who passed the orders down. It was the grey-faced men from the MoD and the Foreign Office and the intelligence services who thought them up. They were the ones who had ‘interviewed’ him and Chris since their return, the ones who always referred to the guerrillas as ‘communists’ or ‘terrorists’, the ones who implied the two of them had gone on a murderous spree, like a couple of armed England supporters lost in the mountains.

  By their own lights, they were not unsympathetic. The two SAS men had been simply out of their depth. They had succumbed to stress, to the heat, to their own ignorance – to anything but the call of their consciences.

  What did these people know? Absolutely nothing.

  So how could he ever trust an order again? He hadn’t got a clue.

  The mist cleared as they approached the top of the mountain. Just a hill it would have been in Guatemala, but here they could see for miles, south-east to the dark-green expanse of the Forest of Dean, west into the heartlands of Wales. This mountain had once formed part of the border between two estranged cultures, which somehow seemed appropriate.

  They took in the panoramic view, not speaking to each other. And then Hajrija untied the knot in the plastic bag, and all three of them reached in a hand. ‘For Tomás,’ she said, and one by one they cast their handfuls of orange petals to the wind.

  Five thousand miles away Emelia awoke, a smile on her face. The poem was lying beneath her chin, where it had fallen in the night. She almost had it memorized now. ‘I knew him and still he is there in me…I come back to see him, and every day I wait.’

  She sat up and reached for the book which served as her pillow, and replaced the folded piece of paper between the leaves of brightly coloured birds.

  OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES

  Behind Iraqi Lines

  Mission to Argentina

  Sniper Fire in Belfast

  Desert Raiders

  Samarkand Hijack

  Embassy Siege

  Guerrillas in the Jungle

  Secret War in Arabia

  Colombian Cocaine War

  Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan

  Heroes of the South Atlantic

  Counter-insurgency in Aden

  Gambian Bluff

  Bosnian Inferno

  Night Fighters in France

  Death on Gibraltar

  Into Vietnam

  For King and Country

  Kashmir Rescue

  Headhunters of Borneo

  Kidnap the Emperor!

  War on the Streets

  Bandit Country

  Days of the Dead

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