Beneath a Panamanian Moon

by David Terrenoire

  “I told you he’d catch up,” Cooper said.

  “Yeah,” Ramirez said, “but look at him. He looks like he’s about to pass out.”

  “He’s here, that says something.”

  “Yeah, it says he’s scared of getting lost.”

  I put my hands on my knees and tried not to throw up. Then I sat down and figured I’d quietly die here and let the army ants have me. It was a pleasant thought, my molecules feeding an egg-laying queen, making babies by the millions. My ribs heaved as I tried to get enough oxygen to my brain to figure out how to levitate my ass back home.

  “Come on, we got a full day ahead of us and a lot of land to cover.”

  “I thought for sure we’d be at the fucking North Pole by now.”

  “Tierra del Fuego,” Cooper said, looking up past the branches toward the sun. “We’ve been running south.”

  “I should have been a dentist,” I said.

  After resting for a few minutes, we were back on our feet. I was too tired to push away the vines and branches. I just focused on the backs of the two men running in front of me. I couldn’t let them get away because I swore that if I ever caught up with them, I would kill them. Just the thought of it kept me pounding down the shadows, chasing the two men who were always a few steps in front of me, always out of reach.

  It was shortly before breakfast when we came out of the jungle and onto the beach, where I fell on my back, knees up, arms out, ready for my maker to take me home.

  “They want us at class at oh nine hundred hours,” Cooper said. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  “What class?”

  “Security class. They’re teaching the security students how to use antipersonnel mines,” Cooper said.

  “So they can use them against all the tourists storming the beach,” Ramirez grumbled. “Jesus, if it weren’t for the money, I’d go home and sleep for a few years.”

  “The money is good,” said Cooper. “I just want enough to go back to law school. What about you?”

  Ramirez spit in the sand. “I’m spending all mine on hookers and beer.”

  And the money was good. Damn good for living at the beach. And I was about to run into another good thing about working at La Boca. She was twenty-four, blond, and inexplicably fond of piano players.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I went through the lobby and hit the stairs. I stopped midway and listened. Someone was playing the piano. One. Note. At. A. Time. A woman sang Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby,” but the only words she knew were the title.

  “‘Santa baby,’” she sang, and played the melody with one finger until the lyrics came back around to “Santa baby” again.

  I went into the dining room and there, near the French doors, stood a young woman with hair the color of movie sunlight. She wore a swimsuit bottom and a white button shirt tied just below her breasts. One knee was propped on the piano stool and a flip-flop dangled from her toe.

  “There are more words to that song, you know. And if you play three notes at once, you get what’s called a chord,” I said. “It’s all the rage.”

  She looked up, startled, and she was so beautiful I thought I’d stroked out on the trail and was still lying in the dirt, surrounded by lower primates, hallucinating. And it was okay. In fact, it was better than okay.

  “You must be the piano player,” she said.

  “Word gets around.”

  “You know how I can tell?”

  “How?”

  “You’re pale. Don’t they have sunlight where you come from?”

  “Not at night. In December.”

  She went back to playing each note. “When did you get in?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “So this piano is your responsibility now.”

  “I’m barely responsible for myself.”

  She smiled and said, “Do you always smell like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an alcoholic warthog three days dead in the sun.”

  “Most days I crawl into the shade.” I wiped the sweat from my face with my shirttail and said, “You must be the man’s daughter.”

  She held out her hand. “I am the man’s daughter. My name’s Kris.”

  “Hi, I’m—”

  “John Harper, I know.” She lowered her eyes and her lashes fell against her cheeks. I’m a sucker for that. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. We don’t get many music lovers around here. Especially such cute ones.”

  Flattery. I’m a sucker for that, too. I put on my finest smile.

  “Can you really play this thing?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Could you teach me?”

  “It would be a pleasure.”

  “Right now?” She sat down and slid over on the bench to give me room.

  I heard men gathering in the lobby. “I can’t right now. But maybe later?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said, and I floated up the steps.

  * * *

  I was the last one to class, my hair wet and my clothes damp. When I sat next to Cooper he said, “Who smells like a flower?”

  The class was held outside on the edge of a firing range chopped out of the jungle. Cooper, Ramirez, and I were the only Anglos. Sitting on the far side of the bleachers, in their own group, were half a dozen very intense Latinos. One of them quietly translated as the instructor, an Aryan with a ranger haircut, high and tight, stood in the shade and introduced himself.

  “Gentlemen, my name is Melvin Short, but most of the staff here know me as Glory Hog. You might wonder why. So, to save us all time I will explain. It’s because of this.” He held up a battered Newsweek magazine. On the cover was a ranger, his face striped in green and black for combat. It was our instructor, Melvin. “Now, you may call me Mr. Short, or G, or even Hog, but the only person who calls me Melvin is your girlfriend when I bone her, and I do bone her on a regular basis. Is that clear?”

  The Latinos did not laugh.

  “I’m glad to have new blood to laugh at my material. Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I understand you’re familiar with weapons so I may call on you to help me demonstrate for the class, is that all right?”

  We nodded. I added a “Yes, sir,” out of a habit instilled in me by an insistent young captain and the sole of his boot.

  Hog put the Newsweek aside, put his hands behind his back, and addressed the Latinos, pausing as the translator repeated each sentence in Spanish. “We will learn only defense here as you have been chosen to protect your bosses at home, not to pursue the bad guy in the field. Considering the brief amount of time you’ll be here, that is a good thing because the enemy in the bush is a bad hombre and would eat your heart out.” Hog waited for the translation. “Sending you amateurs up against the FARC is like sending Girl Scouts up against the Oakland Raiders in the friggin’ Super Bowl.”

  The translator translated and a few in the audience shifted on their haunches and grumbled. They weren’t happy being compared to a bunch of Girl Scouts.

  Hog ignored them and picked up a gray tray the size and shape of a small frozen dinner. “This, gentlemen, is a Claymore antipersonnel mine. It is a nasty little item filled with steel balls, seven hundred of them, all about the size of a nine-millimeter bullet. They shred flesh, right down to the bare bloody bone of anything unfortunate enough to be caught in its kill zone. Now, have any of you used Claymores before?”

  Ramirez and Cooper raised their hands.

  “Anyone else? No? Okay then, pay attention.” He gestured into the open firing range. “Most often, you will use Claymores in either an ambush situation in which you place them along the expected route of your enemy, or as a defensive deterrent to an insurgent force around a fixed perimeter. But be aware, gentlemen, that in the hands of a determined enemy, these defensive weapons can also become your worst nightmare. So, watch and learn, people.”

  The translator whispered the translation and the men nodded their heads, the insult forgotten in their eage
rness to see these weapons in action.

  The firing range was about three hundred yards deep and twenty-five yards wide. A few rows of coiled barbed wire had been stretched across the field to simulate a defensive position. A single scarecrow, no more than a wooden cross, a gourd head, and an olive-drab shirt stood in the center of the field. On a folding table were wired detonating devices small enough to hold in your hand.

  “Ordinarily,” said Hog, “you would clear a kill zone all around your position. This range is for demonstration purposes only. Do not, I repeat, do not fight in this narrow a corridor or your enemy will feed your huevos to his dogs. Now, are there any questions?”

  There were none.

  “Okay,” said Hog, “I want you all to put on your safety goggles.”

  We did.

  “Now, it’s nighttime,” Hog said, “and it’s as dark as Castro’s asshole—”

  The translator murmured and the Latin men laughed.

  “—you’re in your foxhole and you hear this sound.” Hog pulled a wire and a can rattled out in the field. “You ascertain the direction of the sound, locate the detonator of the mine in that area, and set it off like this.”

  Hog picked up a detonator, switched off the safety, and fired one of the mines. The boom was louder than I expected and the scarecrow was knocked backward, stripped of his head, his shirt tattered to rags in one single explosive instant. The men went “Aaaah” like a family watching fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  “You!” Hog pointed at me. “Come here.”

  I stepped off the bleachers and stood in front of the instructor’s table.

  “Pick up that detonator.” Hog pointed to one. I did as I was told.

  “This is the safety,” he said. “When you want to fire the Claymore, you switch off the safety and squeeze this.” He looked me in the eye, scrutinizing me for any trace of panic or instability. “You okay?”

  I said I was.

  He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Outstanding. Now I want you to pretend. Can you pretend, New Guy?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “All right. Pretend it’s night. Can’t see shit. Pitch-black. You got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You’re on guard. You still pretending, New Guy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you see?” He held up three fingers in front of my face.

  “Where?” I said. “What?”

  “Good man.” He patted my cheek. Then he waved and a shadow moved out of the treeline. It was a man, camouflaged from head to toe and dressed in a sniper’s Gilly suit. If he moved you could see him. If he stopped, he looked like another dusty bump of vegetation in the landscape.

  Slowly the shadow worked his way under and through the wire until he was directly in front of the instructor’s table. He laid a small canvas satchel at the foot of the table and pulled a handle. As he made his way back through the wire, he stopped at each mine and turned it around, facing us. When all the Claymores were turned, the shadow tied a string to the barbed wire and slowly crept back into the trees.

  “You still pretending, New Guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you hear a noise,” Hog whispered. Everything was silent. The men in the bleachers leaned forward in anticipation. Even the jungle animals seemed to quiet. Then, all the cans strung to the wire clanked.

  “Quick, New Guy! What do you do?” Hog was pressing against me, nose to nose. “The man’s coming, he’s going to kill you, New Guy. He’s going to cut out your mama’s heart! Quick, do something!”

  “But he turned—”

  “He’s gonna kill you, New Guy! Quick, take off the safety!”

  I did.

  “Now what do you do? What did I tell you to do?”

  “Fire the mine?”

  “Then fire it! Holy shit, New Guy!”

  “But the mine’s been—”

  Hog screamed into my face, “Fire it, fire it, fire it! NOW!”

  I pressed the detonator. The boom filled the sunlit morning and everywhere was the shush of little pellets hitting leaves and grass and uniformed men. The Latinos in the bleachers gasped, mouths open wide in terror. Then the canvas satchel popped and sent a thick stream of red smoke swirling into the air around us.

  Hog was calm again. “You just wasted your clients, New Guy. Nice work. But don’t think you’re going home, because that satchel charge just blew you into tiny little pieces about the size of your pecker. Now, get your sorry ass back to the bench.” I joined Cooper and Ramirez. They were laughing and brushing sand off their clothing.

  “Now, those mines were harmless. But in a real firefight you would all be in a massive world of hurt. The moral, gentlemen, is not to let your guard down. Don’t assume that your firepower will save you because it won’t.” Hog looked at the men on the bleachers. “Can anyone tell the New Guy what he should have done?”

  “Stayed home,” Ramirez said.

  A tall Latino stood up and said, “Use your weapon.” He was decked out in twin leather shoulder holsters, each holding a stainless-steel .45 with ivory grips. He drew one and held it high in the air. The sunlight glinted off the barrel. He smiled at all the other men as if to say, “I am the only real killer here. I know how to use my weapon.”

  “Bueno, Helizondo,” said Hog. “Go ahead.”

  Helizondo laughed and fired his big automatic toward the jungle. He emptied the magazine and looked around at the rest of us, a smile on his face.

  “Now that Helizondo is dead,” Hog said, “having given away his position with his muzzle flashes, does anyone know what you should do if you hear something out there in the darkness?”

  I raised my hand.

  “New Guy, I thought you were dead.”

  “A flesh wound,” I said, and Hog laughed.

  “So, you want to try again?”

  I nodded. “Use a hand grenade,” I said.

  “Excellent. That’s right. Use your hand grenade. Do not fire your weapon at night at any noise or you, like Helizondo, will be dead and so will your comrades because, like an idiot, you have given away your position to the enemy.”

  Helizondo looked confused as the translator murmured Spanish into his ear. On the word idiota, Helizondo straightened as if struck. None of the other Latino men would look at him. Helizondo gathered his dignity, walked over to where I was sitting, and smacked me hard enough to send me backward off the bench. He needed to hit someone for the insult and, since hitting Hog didn’t seem like a healthy choice, he chose me because I was the one who had shamed him with the right answer. I understood all this, through the stars that swam around in my head, but understanding and accepting are two very different things.

  Before I could get up and defend myself, Ramirez had Helizondo on his back, the muzzle of the man’s own .45 in his mouth. Ramirez was whispering in Spanish, too fast for me to understand. He finished by saying, “Comprende, motherfucker?”, and Helizondo nodded yes, his eyes wide, and Mad Dog Ramirez let him up. Ramirez ejected the magazine, pulled back the slide to clear the chamber, backhanded the magazine into the jungle, and handed the empty pistol to Helizondo, grip first.

  “I can see we’ve run out of time,” Hog said, “not to mention patience. So let’s take a break.” The Latin men stood in their small group and smoked cigarettes and glared at us.

  “Thanks, Mad Dog,” I said.

  “The name’s Phil. Only my mother calls me ‘Mad Dog.’”

  “Thanks, Phil.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  That afternoon, when the entire compound lazed away the hour after lunch waiting for the one o’clock rains to pass, I sat in my room and put together what I knew so far, which wasn’t much.

  The hotel was training bodyguards and home security. I still didn’t know who the guests were, the men who would be the employers of the hotel’s graduates, so I’d have to work on that, and the compound in the jungle still needed a look, but eve
n if the guests turned out to be cousins of Saddam Hussein, and the facility was the exact layout of Madonna’s Malibu beach house, that still only told me what was going on, but not why. And who, besides Phil Ramirez, was on the ground working for Smith? Who had bugged the Colonel’s meeting with the foreign man, and could I depend on his help if I found myself wearing my ass for a hat?

  The rains stopped and the sun turned the afternoon into a sauna. I was dreaming about air-conditioning and bored, beautiful women when Phil pushed open my door and said, “Frag class. Let’s go.”

  “Me?”

  “Hog’s giving a class on frags. After you wasted everyone with the Claymores, he wants you there.”

  “What’s to know about a grenade? You pull the pin and throw it.”

  Phil leaned against the doorjamb, his hands in his pockets. “I know you’re not arguing with me.”

  Phil could have pinched my head off with two fingers, so I said, “Let’s go.” While I was locking up, I said, “What do you know about Coop?”

  “He’s okay.”

  “You served with him?”

  “No, but I know guys who have. He’s on our side.”

  That might have been good enough for Phil, but it wasn’t good enough for me.

  The class was held on the same range as the morning’s instruction on Claymore mines. This time the students stood behind a bunker made of earth and wood and watched as Iceman and Hamster demonstrated from a concrete bunker set into the firing line. Hog stood in front of us, his hands behind his back. “Has anyone here ever thrown a live grenade?”

  All but two of the Latinos raised their hands. I had tossed exactly one hand grenade in basic training, but I’d tossed it far enough away, and it did explode, so I had my hand up with the rest of the men.

  “New Guy, so, unlike the Claymore, this is a skill you’ve acquired?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly—”