Beneath a Panamanian Moon

by David Terrenoire

  Cooper looked up from his leg stretches. “What’s eating you?”

  “I want to run another route today, is that all right?”

  Phil was impatient and in a bad mood. “Let’s get moving. Another minute of this and I’m going to kill somebody.”

  “Lead on, Monkeyman,” Cooper said.

  The three of us took off at an easy pace. I knew the direction I had to go and, with the sun in its spot, and whatever magnetic magic there is in our human skulls that give some of us a sense of direction, I knew we would soon intersect with a path that would take us to a road, across a river, and on to the urban warfare site the satellite had picked up in the jungle. And, of course, I got lost.

  After going in the wrong direction for twenty minutes, I stopped and took my bearings again.

  Cooper raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

  Phil and I argued about where we were, where we were going, and how best to get there. I studied the map in my head, then the sunlight, and then the map again. While Phil was kneeling by a slow-moving stream, a long-legged rodent emerged from the underbrush, stopped, and looked at us. Satisfied we were either harmless or that he could outrun us, the creature sipped water from the stream. He was so close Phil could have swallowed him.

  When he was gone, Phil said, “What the fuck was that?”

  “It was an agouti,” I said, “a member of the guinea pig family.”

  “An agouti? How did you know that?”

  “I read a book, Phil.”

  “Maybe I’ll give that a try,” he said.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “If we’re looking for a river, we should be able to find it if we follow this stream.”

  “That’s your idea?”

  “Yeah. What do you think?”

  Phil looked unimpressed. “What? You read that in a book, too?”

  “What’s so important about this place you’re trying to get to?” Cooper asked.

  “I won’t know until I get there.”

  “I hope they have a Starbucks,” he said, and started off along the stream. Phil and I followed. It wasn’t easy, and there were times we had to detour around a thick tangle of vine, but we kept going in its general direction until it joined a river so muddy it looked thick enough to plow.

  “Which way?” Coop said.

  I looked up and down stream, trying to match the twists in the river to the bends recorded by the satellite. I took a guess. “This way,” I said, and pointed upstream.

  We hadn’t gone more than a mile when we saw the footbridge, one rope strung across the current, with two other ropes, shoulder high, strung for balance. We crossed over, carefully, the bridge bobbing and swaying under our weight. The river below us was swift and carried trees and bushes torn roughly from an upstream bank.

  The path was easy to follow now, and clear. Five- and six-feet wide in places, and well used, it made the next three miles an easy run compared to the struggle of crashing through the foliage alongside the stream. Near the crest of a hill the path widened and spread into what looked like a staging area, with a helicopter LZ among the ruts and the tire tracks of large trucks. Beyond the LZ, streets ran through the first plywood-and-cement buildings of an empty village. The three of us walked down what looked like the main street, wide enough for parades. The buildings on either side were just plywood fronts, like a Hollywood set. The deeper we went, the more detailed the buildings got, with doors and window frames.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “What’s it look like, Coop?”

  “It looks like an urban assault course.”

  Phil bent down and picked up a spent brass casing. “We got live fire.” He tossed it to Coop.

  “AKs. We don’t train with AKs.”

  “Maybe we don’t,” I said, “but maybe the students from the hotel do.”

  “Why would they train with different weapons than the ones we use at the range?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cooper chewed on the inside of his lip, turning the brass casing around in his hand. He looked up and said, “Something doesn’t smell right.”

  It was time to give Cooper a way out. “That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Whatever it is stinks all the way up to Washington.”

  Cooper looked from me to Phil and back to me again. “Both of you?”

  Phil nodded.

  “Anyone else at the hotel besides you two?”

  “There were. They’re both dead,” I said. I explained about the satellite photos and the anonymous guests, and how something big was set to go down on New Year’s Eve. “I’m supposed to learn who is staying at the hotel, if they’re bankrolling something bigger than just training their own personal security forces, and what they’re using this place for, a place that even most of the American instructors don’t know about. Once I know these things, I can go home,” I said. “The question for you is, do you want a piece of this, because if you don’t, Phil and I will understand.”

  Phil said, “That’s right, Coop. You can go back to the hotel and nobody will say shit about it.”

  “No,” Cooper said. “I’m good. Just tell me something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re the good guys, right?”

  Phil pointed a finger at me and said, “He is. I’m not.”

  Cooper turned it over in his head a few times and said, “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  We split up. Phil went left, Cooper and I went right. The satellites had seen just a small corner of the complex. Most of the streets and structures were hidden beneath triple canopy, impossible to see by air, even by helicopter.

  “How’d they know about this place?”

  “Infrared shots of night training,” I said. “That’s when they started asking questions, after seeing the thermals.”

  “Why can’t they use Predators to snap pics of the hotel?”

  “They’re all in Iraq and Afghanistan. Panama isn’t exactly a high priority.”

  Coop and I walked between the bullet-pocked plywood, made haunted-house creepy by the darkness of the bush and the silence of the jungle around us.

  “No wildlife,” Coop whispered.

  “It’s all been chased away by the gunfire,” I said, touching a splintered bullet hole.

  We turned a corner. Cooper said, “Now this is weird.”

  There was no question that we were in a simulated city street with alleys and walkways, open plazas, several burned-out cars and a bus, its windows and tires long gone, its shell blackened. Steel silhouettes stood on each corner, on springs, their surfaces dented by live rounds. I touched one. “Whoever this is supposed to be looks mighty dead.”

  “Mighty dead,” Coop said.

  Phil came up from our left and our nerves were so stretched that if we’d been armed we might have shot him.

  “You guys are jumpy as cats,” he said.

  “What’d you find?”

  “I walked the perimeter. They’re using Claymores, RPGs, frags. I even found a launcher for a Stinger.”

  Cooper stood, his hands on his hips, and turned around in a full circle. That discomforting feeling of having been here before got under his skin and gave him an itch he couldn’t scratch. “Déjà vu like a mother. This seem familiar to you, Phil?”

  Phil looked around at the dummy structures, with their vacant windows and doors. “Looks like a street,” he said and shrugged. “Narrow, like a slum.”

  Cooper shook his head. “No, not a slum. It could be the old part of the city. What do you think?” Without waiting to hear Phil’s answer, Coop walked farther on, trying to match where he was with a place he’d recently been. “This is Casco Viejo, I’m sure of it.” He jogged past plywood shattered by live fire, jumped over man-sized divots in the dirt caused by hand grenades, and ran around more burned-out shells of automobiles, their charred steel perforated by bullet holes. Phil and I ran after him, catching him as he stood looking up at a single, large structure at the center of
the street. Here there were doors, kicked in so many times that the impressions of boots were a permanent part of the grain. Inside were complete rooms, and a staircase, the walls shredded by bullet holes and smudged by smoke and tear-gas grenades.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” Coop said.

  “What? What is it?” I asked. “Where are we supposed to be?”

  Cooper walked around the open room, the trees overhead speckling the walls with shifting bits of sunlight.

  “I was just here. Just two days ago.”

  “Where? What is this place?”

  Cooper stopped, his hands on his hips, staring up at the balcony. “It’s the Presidential Palace,” Cooper said. “They’re training men to storm the Presidential Palace.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I did a three-sixty in the open room, taking in the doorways, the staircase, the balcony, every structural detail of the Presidential Palace interior, right down to the plywood reception desk.

  “This is stupid,” Phil said. “They can’t be thinking of taking over the country. They don’t have the people.”

  “How do we know?” Coop said. “We have no idea how many people they’ve put through this course and then settled into Panama City.”

  “Sleeper cells,” I said. “Terrorists.”

  “Exactly.”

  Phil still wasn’t convinced. “No one has enough money to overthrow an entire fucking country.”

  “What if the richest people did it together?”

  “The guests at the hotel,” Cooper said.

  “That’s what I’m thinking. I’m also thinking we should boogie on out of here before we get visitors.”

  We found our way back to the landing zone and started our quick jog back toward the river. All three of us had our own thoughts, our own questions, and the steady physical rhythm of running let us work through them.

  “I don’t get it,” Phil grumbled. “Are they so fucking rich they think they can steal a whole country?”

  “I think they’re getting drug money, too,” I said.

  Phil laughed. It sounded more like a bark of disbelief. “Drug money? In Panama?”

  “The Colonel mentioned Laos to another man, a young guy with a Cuban accent.”

  “Cubans,” Phil said. “That sounds like spooks.”

  “And Laos,” Coop said. “The Company financed ops in Southeast Asia with drug money. Maybe they’re doing the same thing here.”

  I didn’t want to believe it. “No. That’s too crazy. The people I work for would know if the CIA were involved.”

  “Not unless your people are out of the loop,” Cooper said. “Is that possible?”

  “In Washington, anything is possible except secrets. Someone would know.”

  “You mean like who killed Kennedy?”

  “Phil, don’t start.”

  “Maybe,” Phil said, “it’s a rogue outfit.”

  “But why start a revolution in Panama?”

  “The Canal,” Phil said. “What else has this country got that anyone could possibly want?”

  Coop was staying quiet, working through his own questions in his head. As we neared the footbridge Coop stopped, raised his fist in the air, and silently eased into hiding. Phil pulled me off the path into the brush. Coop crawled back to us. “I think there’s someone waiting for us across the river.”

  “You see anyone?”

  “No, but it feels hinky,” he said. “I’m going to check it out.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Phil said.

  Before I could object, they melted into the foliage, as substantial as smoke. Damn, I thought, how did they do that? After what felt like hours, after I’d exhausted myself straining to hear, see, smell, or intuit anything beyond the usual jungle critters, the two of them reappeared.

  “They know we’re here. They’re setting up an ambush.”

  “To kill us?”

  Phil gave me a look through half-closed eyelids. “No, Harp, I think maybe they want to invite us to a party, what do you think?”

  Coop knelt and drew a map in the dirt. “They’ve strung Claymores along the trail here and here, leading up to the bridge.”

  “Jesus, you’re kidding.”

  Cooper shook his head. “And they’ve got men here and here along the far bank, armed with AKs.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Phil said, “We can try to run away—”

  “And they’ll catch us one at a time,” Coop said, “later. When we’re by ourselves.”

  “So we’re going to take ’em out now,” Phil said.

  Cooper nodded. “We talked it over.”

  “Who talked it over?”

  “Phil and I.”

  “You didn’t think to ask me what I wanted to do? I’m the smart one.”

  “We’ll let you be smart next time,” Phil said. “But right now we have a plan.” Phil’s thin-lipped grin was an unsettling shadow of the scar that ran across his neck, ear to ear.

  I didn’t think I was going to like this plan. Then after I heard it, I was sure I didn’t like it. “I don’t like this,” I said. “I think we should reconsider the runaway option.”

  “Shut up,” Phil said. “This is the only way.”

  “But why do I have to do this?”

  “Because,” Phil said, “you’re the smallest.”

  “And the one with the least experience,” Cooper said.

  “And you play piano,” Phil said. “To these macho pendejos, that makes you suspect. You’re the one they’ll go after.”

  This did nothing to put me at ease, and yet, ten minutes later I was at the rope bridge that crossed the river, hiding in the underbrush and waiting, watching the far riverbank for movement.

  Behind me, the explosion of a Claymore split the morning. The air around me convulsed and seven hundred steel balls tore away leaves and bark from the trees.

  I screamed and ran from the bushes, holding my head. I raced blindly for the rope bridge, tricky even when you took it slow, but running made it buck and jump like a living thing. The river narrowed here considerably, churning up the water and giving the current a dizzying speed beneath my feet.

  I was a third of the way across the bridge when a shot zinged past my head, then another, and a voice shouted, “¡Alto!” I did. I alto’ed so fast the bridge quivered.

  Two young men dressed in camo appeared at the far end of the bridge. They carried AK-47s and one aimed his rifle at me while the second stood at the bridge and waved me forward. “Venga,” he said. Come. His voice would have carried more authority if it hadn’t cracked from a D-flat to a G-sharp.

  I started to back up.

  “Venga aquí,” he said. “Aquí,” and pointed to his side of the river.

  I shook my head. “No. No aquí.”

  Another man, older, appeared out of the brush and ordered the two younger men to get me. They looked at him as if he must be kidding. I know that look. I had used that look quite a lot myself lately. Obviously, by shouting at them, the older man convinced them that he wasn’t joking. The two slung their rifles and started across the bridge toward me.

  With each step they took forward, I took a step back.

  The older man unholstered his pistol and yelled for me to stop. I took three steps back. The older man shot at me, two times, but at a distance of forty yards, the nearest bullet didn’t come any closer than three feet. Which was close enough to make all my hair stand on end and my sphincter pucker up around my jaw. I turned and scurried off the bridge and the two young men scrambled to catch up.

  By the time I hit the trail, another man was shooting at me with a rifle, and these shots, fired in three-round bursts, zipped by my head and, like the pistol shots in Crystal City, made my eardrums pulse in a highly unpleasant way. I ran harder. Encouraged by the shots, the young men crossed the bridge. They weren’t far behind me. I could hear them thrashing through the brush, Latin hounds on the trail of a frightened Yanqui rabbit.

  The tr
ail dog-legged to the left and I went right. I grasped what I needed. The two young men, more confident on dry land, sprinted up the trail. When they crossed in front of my hiding place, I jerked the trip wire. It was no longer tied to a Claymore detonator, but to a young, springy sapling, and as I pulled, the sapling swept across the trail, whipping both men backward and off their feet.

  Phil and I jumped them before they could stagger upright. I grabbed a rifle, racked the bolt, and stuck the barrel into the shorter man’s eye. They both froze and Phil went to work, ripping their shirts into strips and trussing them up like rodeo calves, their hands and ankles tied together behind them. Gagged, they rolled their eyes, silently pleading for their lives, or at least a more dignified way to die. Phil dragged them whimpering into the bushes.

  Cooper came back along the path. “The other two have come out and are looking across the river. It won’t be long before one of them tries to cross.”

  “How many do you think there are?” Phil asked.

  “I don’t know. Could be a whole company over there in the trees.”

  Phil thought a minute. “Okay. I don’t see how we have much choice. Give Coop your rifle,” he told me. I didn’t argue.

  Quietly, we approached the riverbank. Cooper was right. One of the men was in the middle of the rope bridge. The older man waited on the other side, urging his reluctant comrade forward.

  Phil and Cooper came up out of the treeline and aimed the AKs at the man on the bridge and the officer on shore. Phil ordered both of them to cross the bridge. Neither of them moved. The man on the bridge, exposed and alone, was scared. The man on the bank was an officer, too proud to surrender, and brave considering he wasn’t the one stuck in the middle of the footbridge.

  “Don’t make us come over there and get you,” Phil shouted.

  The officer on the bank pulled a K-Bar knife from his boot. He held it high so that we could see the blade, then he went to work on the bridge.

  The man on the bridge saw this, too, and shouted for the man to stop. Quickly, he tried to move back to the far shore before the rope fell away.

  “Don’t do it!” Cooper yelled.

  Phil fired the AK over the man’s head but it just inspired the officer to work faster.