Off to the right the tire-truck ruts resumed at the edge of the rock; in plain sight they stretched up into the woods toward the southeast. Julio and Vargas had spent half a day making that false trail.
Vargas put the Land Cruiser down the slope toward the creek that made its shallow way along the bottom of the rock slab. Driving slowly in the water with white froth birling off the hubcaps they spent a difficult five minutes pushing uphill in the streambed. This part always troubled Cielo because the rock supported no growth at all and this meant they would be visible from the air for the duration of this stretch. Ground trackers would lose them at this point but all it needed was one helicopter or a light plane passing over at the wrong moment.
Zigzagging from one side to another Vargas wrestled the Land Cruiser toward the head of the canyon. Eventually the bottom changed from solid rock to gravel; the walls began to narrow and the trees to press down; here Vargas and Cielo had to get out and unwind the cable from the winch. Hooking it to an enormous banyan they hauled the Land Cruiser up over a slumping shoulder of rock, after which Vargas reeled in the cable and they drove on through the trees.
This was the edge of El Yunque—the Luquillo Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rain forest on U.S. soil—the Puerto Rican mountain jungle. In his odd-job days as a tour guide in the late 1960s he had recited by rote that the El Yunque Forest covered nearly thirty thousand acres, climbed to an altitude of thirty-five hundred feet and absorbed an annual rainfall of more than one hundred billion gallons. The figures were impressive in the abstract; when you got down to a personal level what was more impressive was the sense of utter isolation that cloaked him every time he penetrated the jungle. Once inside the towering shade of El Yunque he no longer had any confidence he was on the same planet.
A paved road of narrow hairpin bends and frequent washouts bisected the forest to the east, going right over the central pass between the peaks of El Toro and El Yunque; that was the tourist route and if you were on it you could be back in the fleshpots of San Juan in less than an hour—it was only twenty-five miles away. But on these outer slopes there were no roads, no farms, no evidence that humans had ever passed this way.
Overhead the sun flickered like a moving signal lamp among the interlaced branches of sierras and tree ferns, colorados and palms, clumps of bamboo a hundred feet high, dotted bromiliads and orchids below; a rotting rich thickness of life.
Bugs buzzed. Parrots, macaws—flashes of color. And always the chirping of tiny coqui frogs like cicadas in the branches. The air was damp but not unpleasant; thinner here than at sea level and the smell was rain-clean.
Even to cut their basic primitive pioneer road they’d had to spend months chopping their way through coagulated undergrowth and laying stones across watercourses; at frequent intervals the rains washed these away and there was never a trip without having to stop and replace them. And still the pitch of the ground was so steep they had to use the winch several times each way.
It made for a long difficult trek despite the fact that the distance between the lowland farm where he’d left Stefano and the El Yunque camp was not more than seven miles as the buzzard flies and perhaps sixteen miles by pioneer track: They’d never done it in less than two and a half hours.
Twice after the rock slab they covered their trail again—made as if to strike out along false roads they’d prepared; then doubled back through water or rock.
A determined Indio tracker with dogs might find the camp eventually but he’d need to have a good idea where to look and he’d take so long about it that they’d have considerable warning of his approach. As added security they’d laid tripwires across the path on the high ridges nearing the camp. Driving in, Cielo had to dismount twice from the Land Cruiser to disconnect the wires while Vargas drove across them; then he hooked them up again and they rolled on into the camp. The tripwires were connected to cowbells in the cave—a rudimentary device but adequate.
The roadway entered the camp by way of a narrow gap—bamboo on one side, a sheer drop on the other: The path rode along this brief shelf and tipped down toward the camp of huts. Nothing short of a wrecking ball could make headway through the thickness of high bamboo that screened it. This was the only way in—easy to command, easy to defend; conceivably a man or two could deny passage to a battalion.
It wasn’t going to come to that. Cielo had no ambition to hold out heroically against an armed assault. Discovery here would mean surrender; he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice his men for nothing. The chief weapons in his arsenals were secrecy and concealment and deception.
There was a man on guard at the gap; there always was; this one waved his hand lazily and didn’t bother to unsling his submachine gun and Cielo reminded himself to have a talk with the man later—they all were slipping toward apathy, taking things for granted, depending on tripwired cowbells in place of vigilance.
Past the gap the road dipped toward the huts. It was a compact area with its back to the cliff, screened by thick growths of high bamboo and trees that soared to vertiginous heights; the cliff was a jagged upheaval of faults and abutments on top of which was a flat granite promontory, an open field beyond which another tier of jungle sloped up steeply toward the heights. The promontory overhung the camp and it was his plan to use it as a helicopter landing pad from which heavy equipment could be winched down and rolled into the cave behind the camp.
When he stepped out of the Land Cruiser he found Julio waiting for him.
“Did you bring me a few books?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot.”
“Damn.”
“Read the old ones again. What difference does it make? You can’t tell them apart.”
“The hell I can’t. A man gets bored up here. Did you give the girls a kiss from their uncle?”
“Sure—sure.”
Cielo went into the command hut with his brother; Vargas and Kruger drifted in and Cielo made his report to them—it contained no surprises except for the possibility that the man in the doorway had been spying on him. This disquieted Kruger more than the others; he was volatile and tended to fret about things. Kruger’s Spanish was even worse than his English, even after all the years, and in his presence they all tended to speak English although their conversation was peppered with common Spanish words and phrases. Kruger said, “If someone’s onto us, who?”
“I’ll consult the tea leaves and let you know,” Cielo said, making light of it.
“Have you no idea at all?”
“None, nor do I care very much. Whoever he is he didn’t follow me up here, did he. Let’s have a look at the cave.”
They all trooped out to the foot of the cliff like an inspector general’s party, everyone suitably deferential. The cave was natural—a fault in the rock cleft by some disturbance aeons ago. It was nearly thirty feet high and extended well back into the mountain to a depth of a city block or more. Its width varied considerably from point to point. The floor sloped up from the mouth toward the back, which was a good thing because it meant rainwater didn’t run into the cave. When they’d first discovered it they’d known it was the best they were going to find. You could crowd quite a lot of heavy military equipment in here. Nothing like airplanes or helicopters, nor would it accommodate more than a few tanks, but they weren’t acquiring anything that heavy anyway. The planes wouldn’t be needed until the very end—and Cielo believed the very end would never come. In the meantime there was room for field mortars and rocket launchers and flame throwers, machine guns and small arms and grenades and a few Jeeps that could be winched down or driven up the pioneer road.
The floor of the cave was dusty with debris. Several men were hammering rock drills into uneven lumps; small explosive charges would be set into them. The floor of the cave in its natural state had been jagged and useless; they were flattening it as best they could and knocking protrusions off the walls at the same time.
He vaguely hoped all this violence wasn’t going to bring the whole
thing crashing down. There didn’t seem too much likelihood of that—the cliff was so massive, the cave so small in relation—but Cielo didn’t know much geology and thought perhaps there might be cracks that would be widened by the dynamite. It wasn’t anything he intended to lose sleep over.
He said, “Satisfactory, I think. You’ll be finished in a day or so?”
“As near finished as we need to be,” Julio replied. “We’ve already begun clearing the junk off the floor as you can see. It’ll be ready to receive the armas by tomorrow.”
Kruger said, “Are they delivering so soon?”
“Some of the things will be available tomorrow night,” Cielo said. “Some others will take several weeks.”
They were walking back out onto the open ground. Kruger twisted his head far back on his neck to peer up through the inter-knotted treetops. It was not possible to see properly the promontory above; the outcrop was more of a hint—a darker more substantial mass beyond the matted leaves. The occasional thin finger of sunlight probed down through the mist like a laser; other rays flickered on and off as the breeze stirred the trees. The light here was muted and had a greenish tinge. Sound seemed to be absorbed instantly into the damp cushion of the jungle; the quiet was intense and sometimes distressing—the silence, the dampness, the dim light, the invisibility of the outer world, all these conspired to instill the feeling that one’s senses had been drugged into half service. Cielo found that he slept longer and more often here than he did anywhere else.
Kruger, looking up toward the top, was saying: “I’m still worried about this helicopter delivery system. It’s not secure. A helicopter is so”—he searched for the word—“visible. You know? They have ground radar, don’t they? And anybody can see it going overhead. And it can be heard for miles.”
“I’m not worried about security,” Cielo told him. “Aircraft fly around the island all the time. There are helicopters everywhere these days. The radar can’t follow the helicopter because of the mountains—radar can’t distinguish between one solid object and another. We’ll make deliveries only at night when the clouds are down below us. We can guide him to ground with a flashlight or two, it’s not as if he needs a whole runway lighting system. It’s our good luck Zapatino’s a hell of a chopper pilot—he can do everything but fly upside down, you know. The main risk is weather, of course—we’ll end up aborting flights because of fog.”
Kruger walked away with Vargas; Cielo wasn’t sure he’d reassured the German—Kruger was always looking for things that might go wrong.
When the other two had gone beyond earshot Julio said, “Any news from the old man? Has he mentioned what happened to Emil?”
“No, hermano. Sometimes I hope I’ll never see him again. I wish him to be dead—peacefully—just to have it done with. I don’t have the nerve to tell him he’s crazy. And in the meantime we go through this farce of bringing in weapons by the helicopterload and caching them in this cave, where we both know they will rust away for five hundred years before anybody touches them again. The waste makes me ashamed.”
Julio looked at him harshly. “Are you still thinking of going to the old man and telling him he’s a blind fool?”
“No, I can’t do that. We’ve worked too hard for him for these fifteen years. We’ve earned the money he’s paid us. And when he dies there won’t be any nonsense about waiting for a will to be probated. A man will simply come and give each of us a little booklet containing columns of figures and the numbers of bank accounts in Zurich. Do you think I would jeopardize that? Do you think I want those Zurich bank books burned in his fireplace? We’ve earned that money—and I don’t feel like going back to work guiding tourists or unloading airplane cargos. And I don’t guess you feel like driving a taxi again.”
“Just one thing, Rodrigo. Say the old man dies and your man never comes with the bankbooks?”
“Don’t worry about that. There are ways I trust the old man completely and that’s one of them. He’ll cheat in a lot of ways but not that one.”
“Maybe he won’t cheat you.”
“If you feel that way I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If when the old man dies and you don’t get your share I’ll split mine with you. And I’ll make you a present of all the arms in the cave.”
“That is a promise hermano?”
“A promise. You can dedicate the rest of your life to seeing that the money doesn’t go to waste.”
Julio nodded pensively. “Or the arms.”
Cielo frowned at him, but he did not want to know any more about his brother’s schemes. Then he said, “Where the hell is Emil?”
“He left this morning for San Juan, so he says.”
“I suppose I should count my blessings.”
“I don’t know, Cielo. I don’t trust him when I can’t see him. Suppose he’s hatching something?”
“Hatching what? Do you think he means to hijack this place? Let him—more power to him.”
“Hermano, don’t be facetious. He’s dangerous. He sits off by himself too much—he’s planning something.”
“What? Has he been talking to the others much?”
“He’s taken two or three of them aside. One at a time.”
“Which ones?”
“Ramirez. Ordovara. Kruger, too, I think, but I saw Kruger give him his back. Maybe others, too, that I haven’t seen.”
“He’s plotting a palace coup,” Cielo mused, and smiled when he looked around. “Some palace.”
“I’m worried about some of them, brother. Emil is the old man’s blood.”
“They’re loyal, that much we don’t have to worry about. Loyal to one another, and loyal to us.”
“Or loyal to the Draga name?”
“No, they’d string him along for the amusement but they wouldn’t turn on you and me.”
“Then why hasn’t one of them come forward and told us what he’s up to?”
Cielo brooded on that. Cielo said, “I think we’d better have a little talk with Ramirez and Ordovara.”
Chapter 10
Toting her overnight case, Howard hurried along ahead of her into National Airport’s noisy terminal. By the time she caught up he’d claimed a spot in the ticket-counter queue. She said, “If I’m not back by Thursday, drag the Caribbean.”
“I don’t see the point of this. There’s nothing you can do down there.”
“I can’t sit on my hands.” The line inched forward. She glared at the clock, worried about the time; traffic on the bridge had coagulated around a stalled car and she was late. “Will you do something for me? Will you keep feeding the fire under your friend O’Hillary?”
“Sure—sure.”
“Not that it’ll do much good. It’s a grotesque farce. They’re all engaged in this monstrous masquerade.”
“You’re getting alarmingly paranoid about this, Carole.”
“I am? Then why is it, do you suppose, that I could hire one solitary middle-aged man with a limp and no pull at all, and he was able to accomplish in six days what all the forces of the most powerful government on earth failed to do in fifteen?”
“Your man Crobey may think he knows the name one of them used fifteen years ago but that’s a far cry from catching them. He’s no closer to them than anybody else is. Why persist in this absurd anti-Washington neurosis? You know they’re doing everything they can.”
The queue crept forward a notch. Howard put the case down to free his hands for a cigarette. Carole said, “Don’t you know those things will stunt your growth?” Agitation made her bounce up and down on the balls of her feet; she kept looking resentfully at the clock above the oblivious ticket clerk. A metallic disembodied voice ran around overhead, half comprehensible—“Mr. Equation Funeral, Mr. Equation Funeral, please report to the American Airlines information desk.”
“You’re flagellating yourself,” Howard told her in an intense hiss. “Stop building dungeons in the air. No one’s conspiring to cover up Robert’s murder.”
“How
ard, I’ve never known quite such a round-heeled pushover as you are. Working in the guts of it all this time I’d have thought you’d have learned better. I hold these truths to be self-evident: That irrespective of realities, the deformed indoctrinations of nationalistic stupidities will take precedence every time over basic human morality; that the secret war against Castro is not over just because the President of the United States goes on television and says it’s over; and that us niggers are being discriminated against because these terrorists happen to be the right political color—therefore they will be protected whatever their crimes.”
“Carole, your mouth runneth over.” Howard had gone very pale; he glanced around to see if anyone had overheard.
She slapped her bag down on the counter and demanded her ticket. When that rigamarole was completed—“Aisle or window?… Smoking or nonsmoking?”—she snatched up the boarding pass, hiked her bag over her shoulder and turned to Howard to make a grab for the overnight case. Howard kept it, determined to race along with her to the plane. Striding across the terminal he got some of his color back. “I get awfully tired of banging up against that brittle impregnable wall of your wise-ass cracks,” he drew a shuddering long breath to continue, “and I wish that just once in a while you’d give the rest of the world credit for possessing at least a tenth of the lofty moral values that you claim to possess.”
There was another queue at the security funnel. The metal detector kept beeping and several men were emptying out their pockets of coins, keys, cigarette cases, ballpoints. The loudspeaker announced the final boarding call for Carole’s flight to San Juan.
She began to push forward, cutting into the line, fuming.
Howard grabbed her sleeve. “Calm down. They won’t take off without you—they wouldn’t dare.” The afterthought amused him; she saw it in his eyes and knew abruptly that he was patronizing her. She couldn’t stand it.
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