Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  Foreign automobiles are heavily taxed in most South American countries. The idea is to stimulate the local economy by forcing people to buy locally built or assembled cars. These nations do not like the idea of North Americans driving comparatively cheap cars to their countries and selling them at an outrageous profit to wealthy locals who consider such vehicles a bargain. The carnet is a small book, and each page is perforated into three sections. The first section is taken by a customs officer when a vehicle enters the country, the second section is taken when you leave. If you don't have the vehicle when you want to leave—if it has been stolen, for instance, or demolished in an accident—you forfeit the entire letter of credit, say, 300 percent of the actual value of the vehicle.

  "The carnet situation scares people," Garry said. "They realize that they may need to back the letter of credit with their house. By the time you paint the picture of the truck being stolen in Colombia and the insurance only covering the vehicle and not the markup, they realize they would lose their house to cover the letter of credit. So the carnet is a problem. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can have the truck insured at approximately the amount of the letter of credit."

  "I wonder how our pal in the Caddy handled the carnet," I said.

  "I suppose we'll never know," Garry replied. "I wrote him at the Montreal address he gave Veronica in Ushuaia. No answer. I asked a reporter friend there to look into it. Guy went to Jerzy's place, no one there ever heard of him."

  "So what do you think?"

  "I think he did it and we have to do this drive in under twenty-six days."

  When the local paper, The Times-Transcript, came out that night, there was a long feature story about our upcoming trip. Garry had managed to name every one of his sponsors: GMC truck, Canadian "Motomaster" Tire, Stanadyne Auto Products, Delco Suspension Systems, Detroit Diesel Allison, GM Canada, and something I'd never heard of called Farmer's Milkshakes.

  "Who's Farmer's Milkshakes?" I asked.

  That night, about eight o'clock, Garry and I walked down the beach at Cape Bimet, about a twenty-minute drive outside of Moncton. He had rented a beach-front cottage for a month. "Our vacation," Jane said mildly as we walked in twelve hours after we left. Lucy, three and a half, was watching a video featuring Rainbow Bright, who was, apparently, a chubby white horse who could fly. Or maybe Rainbow Bright was a little girl who could ride the chubby white horse. I never figured it out.

  Karen and Jane had had the kids all day, so Garry and I took them for a walk. Sowerby gently picked up Natalie, who was three months old, born between Garry's first and second reconnaissance trips to South America. Lucy came out of her bedroom wearing a T-shirt and nothing else.

  "Put your swimming suit on," Jane said. Lucy stared up at the assembled adults with the contemptuous disdain of the true sophisticate. "I like to air my bum," she said.

  It only took a moment before Lucy was decently dressed and we were walking down the brown sandy beach. The waters there were shallow, surprisingly warm, and it would be another two hours until dark. The Canadian sun was dithering about above the western horizon on this long summer day, and every little cloud it touched burst into flame so that our shadows fell red-orange on the sand. Lucy was looking for shells, which she pronounced "fells." When I squatted down to examine one of her prizes, she said I looked almost exactly like the Magic Bunny. This creature, I learned, was Lucy's imaginary friend who unaccountably lived in Key West, Florida. Lucy showed me how to hop like the Magic Bunny. I was to squat with my hands balled into fists and placed precisely between my feet. The Magic Bunny hops as high and far as he can and lands back in the proper position, with his balled fists between his feet.

  "Do the Magic Bunny!" Lucy screamed, and I hopped down the beach followed by my red shadow and Lucy's hysterical laughter.

  "Farmer's Milkshakes," Garry said, "is a Canadian dairy. They make these shakes that come in little square boxes, Tetra Packs, and they have a nine-month shelf life. Don't have to be refrigerated. Little seventy-five-cent milk shakes and they want to come on board for five thousand dollars."

  "How did that come about?"

  "Do the Magic Bunny!" Lucy demanded.

  I hopped down the beach in my magical way. Garry said that on a

  flight out of Montreal, he had met a man who represented Farmer's. They had talked a bit and the Farmer's representative came to see the Pan-American run as a good way to promote his product. Farmer's Milkshakes: from the Antarctic through the tropics to the Arctic: the quality never varies. "They're going to give us about a thousand shakes to take with us," Garry said. "Three hundred thirty-three vanillas, three hundred thirty-three chocolates, three hundred thirty-three strawberries."

  "What's in line for tomorrow?" I asked.

  "We've got three more people coming in." Joe Skorupa was the outdoor and boating editor for Popular Mechanics. The magazine was planning a feature story on the Pan-Am run and Skorupa would ride with us for the Peru-to-Colombia leg of the trip, then meet us at the finish line. Jon Stevens was a Canadian photographer Garry had met in Barcelona, and he was coming to take some photos for Skorupa.

  Graham Maddocks was a police officer from Vancouver, Canada. Garry had asked him to be our security consultant. Maddocks had some impressive credentials: he was a hostage negotiator, a member of the Emergency Response Team (SWAT) in Victoria, and had been a bodyguard to British royalty. It all sounded good, but I wondered if the guy knew South America.

  "I met him in Peru," Garry said. "I should tell you that story."

  "What I mean is, does he have any idea about what we're likely to run into down there?"

  "He thinks of things that never occurred to me," Garry said.

  "Like what?"

  "Like: we're driving through some little town on the Pan-Am Highway. You know how those places are, narrow cobblestone lanes, no curbs, houses that front the street, people all around. Okay, we're at a stop sign. It's hot. The windows are open. Somebody runs up, throws a pail of gasoline on us. Sticks his arm in the window, he's holding a Bic lighter. Graham asked me: 'What do you do?'"

  I thought about it as the sun ignited another cloud and the waves came in like pale blood. Natalie was sleeping peacefully in Garry's arms.

  "What do you do?" I asked finally.

  "Do the Magic Bunny!" Lucy squealed.

  ZORRO NEETS THE GASOLINE BANDITS

  [HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT 101]

  August 1987 • Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

  8

  Regarding those pesky gasoline and lighter bandits, Graham Maddocks thought it best if we didn't let ourselves get into such a situation. Which was rather my idea to begin with, though Graham insisted there was a benefit in understanding that it could happen. He wanted to examine every possible worst-case scenario, in detail. The record attempt, he said, should be run like a military operation. A soldier does not encounter problems he has not trained for, or at least considered. A soldier should know all his options. I had a lot of trouble thinking of myself as a driver, much less a soldier.

  Graham Maddocks was a dark-haired, handsome fellow with an ingratiating smile and a polite manner. He was not overly tall, nor did he seem, at first glance, to be heavily muscled. An average sort of guy. Except that after listening to him for a while and examining the way he held himself, I began to see that he was as solid as a chunk of chiseled granite. You could peg a golf ball into his chest and it would come zinging off as if it had hit a brick wall. He was, I thought, a concealed weapon, in and of himself.

  Garry had met Maddocks in January, in Peru, drinking Pisco sours at the bar of the Hotel Gran Bolivar in Lima. Graham was taking a break from his duties on the Victoria, British Columbia, Emergency Response Team, which was basically a special weapons and tactics squad. In order to avoid burnout or the suicidal depression that plagues some cops, Graham took long climbing vacations in South and Central America. Risking death on solo climbs in the high Andes gave him a sense of control over his life that police work
tended to erode.

  Aside from his work with the Emergency Response Team, Graham had served as a bodyguard for British royalty in the Bahamas. As a hostage negotiator, he knew something about the terrorist's motivation and aspirations. Significantly, he had trained with the British SAS, a force whose antiterrorist squads are considered the most skilled in the world.

  At the Hotel Gran Bolivar, Garry found himself grilling the policeman about various South American scams. Maddocks was fascinated with the various schemes crooks had devised to separate inattentive gringos from their money. He was a professional officer who collected crime stories in the way an entomologist might collect butterflies. The more brightly colored and flamboyant the scheme, the more skillfully executed it was, the more Graham Maddocks treasured it. Scams were his hobby.

  Maddocks didn't have a lot of respect for the practitioners of the simple dodge. Climbers, for instance, were continually losing their packs on bus rides to the mountains. "What happens," Graham said, "is that the overhead rack is filled and the climber will put his bag in the rack several seats back." He assumes that anyone trying to steal his gear will have to walk past him, with the pack, to exit. But when the bus stops to pick up and disgorge passengers, someone in the back simply hands the pack through an open window to a confederate on the street.

  Not much skill involved in that modest crime of opportunity. There were better examples of the art of thievery in the larger cities, Lima, for instance, where highly skilled teams of pickpockets could create a diversion while a master razor man slashed open the bottom of a woman's leather purse and caught the contents.

  A less remarkable method of picking pockets was the ubiquitous dirty diversion. Someone who looks fairly presentable poses as a helpful local. As you walk by he notices some dirt on your shirt, generally on the upper arm, just below the point of the shoulder. He wipes it off for you—actually he is wiping the dirt on as he pretends to wipe it off—and someone else picks your pocket. "The dirt," Graham said, "is the diversion. It takes your mind off your wallet. But, consider: what does a person who is scrabbling on the street care if some gringo has dirt on his shirt? Anything unusual, anything that doesn't make sense is a likely diversion."

  Garry sipped his Pisco sour and expressed some doubt that these scams were all that widespread. Maddocks suggested they take a stroll around the Plaza San Martin. "Keep your eyes open," he said. Minutes

  later, in a crowded alleyway, someone actually made the mistake of rubbing dirt on Graham Maddocks. "Sehor, you have . . ." Garry was flummoxed: here was the dirty diversion in the flesh. There was a momentary blur of action, then a frozen tableau: Graham staring down the dirt wiper, his right hand behind him, gripping the wrist of a second man who had his hand in Graham's back pocket. The first man turned and ran. Another blur of action. Graham was now facing the pickpocket. Somehow he had gotten hold of both the man's wrists and was holding them just at chest level in an iron grip. Maddocks stared at the fellow, smiled sadly, and shook his head.

  "Uh, Graham," Garry said. Maddocks glanced over at Sowerby, dropped the pickpocket's arms, and let him go running off into the crowd.

  "Yeah 9 "

  "Have you ever worked as a security consultant?"

  Graham Maddocks had prepared a twenty-page report regarding security on our drive, and we went over each recommendation in detail. We were sitting on lawn chairs in Garry Sowerby's backyard. Fat bees buzzed among the flowers and there was a symphony of birdsong in progress. It seemed as if bandits and terrorists belonged to a distant and probably fictional world.

  Graham said that one option regarding gasoline bandits was to keep the windows closed when passing slowly through towns. And for those gasoline-minded persons inclined to break windows in order to indulge their predilections, Graham suggested heavy-gauge chicken wire on the outside of side windows and on the windscreen. Bulletproof glass was okay, though it wouldn't stop certain kinds of rounds, and was so heavy it would affect the performance capabilities of the truck. Graham thought we would be protected from bullets fired from the front. The engine block would stop just about anything. If they were firing from the front, just duck down and accelerate. Piece of cake. On the other hand, it takes only a minute or so until futile front firing becomes somewhat more lethal and problematic side firing. Light bulletproofing in the doors was a good idea, though it wasn't impervious to certain high-powered rounds. And we were, Graham thought, most vulnerable to shots fired from behind. What we needed was a big slab of tempered steel set behind the extended cab.

  All of this—it's not just a truck anymore, it's an armored vehicle— would cost us in weight and performance. I found myself sinking deep into a kind of glowering paranoia. How about one guy, he's not driving,

  he locks himself up in a little metal egg? How about maybe we just stay home and watch TV?

  A less costly armor option was bulletproof vests. Biker's goggles in case someone breaks the windshield. Garry, having been shot at previously, was furiously taking notes. I began to wonder why I had never had a problem in Latin America. Not once. My experience was that people invite you into their homes and stuff you full of food for days at a crack.

  Graham's perception was much the same, though he attributed his good fortune to forethought and awareness. Likely we would have little problem, but if we expected everything to run smoothly, we were literally asking for trouble. People who don't expect to encounter obstacles encounter obstacles. It was the way of the world.

  In his job, Graham had spent a lot of time consoling victims of violent crimes. "The one thing I hear all the time is, 'I couldn't believe it was happening to me, I never thought it could happen to me.' " Garry nodded vigorously. That's what he thought. Never heard of Shiftas before and suddenly there's six of them firing guns at him. It had taken minutes—minutes!—before he had been able to react.

  We, Garry and I, decided against turning the truck into a tank. We'd take bulletproof vests and goggles. Graham said that we should conduct some ambush drills and have several options in mind in case of ambush. He thought it most likely that an ambush would occur at night. The first option was the back up and drive away. Simply stop some distance from the obstruction on the road. Maybe it would be a fallen tree, or a staged accident. Examine the situation from a distance. Graham had heard of several cases in which people had stopped to render help in such circumstances. When they got out of the vehicle, they were kidnapped, robbed, beaten, killed.

  If the obstacle looked dangerous in any way, back up and drive away. In any case, check the mirrors. Is there a car following? Armed men on foot? If so, consider the second option: the drive around. With our four-wheel drive and high clearance, we could probably escape quite easily. It was unlikely that anyone would have a vehicle with the off-road performance capabilities of our truck. I had a vision of upscale cowpunks cruising over the desert, leaving the bandits in the dust. I liked that scenario. There was a certain romance to it.

  "Naturally," Graham said, "smart bandits are not going to set up an ambush in a place that allows you to drive around. In a mountain environment, you may have a cliff on one side of the road and a rock wall on the other. In the desert there may be deep irrigation ditches

  lining the Pan-Am, and a jungle ambush would probably occur in thick forest."

  So: the third option in an ambush scenario was the ram and drive through. As an illustration of what not to do, Graham told a story about Princess Anne. One day in London, years ago, her limo was blocked by a compact car. The driver of the compact, a mental patient, shot the limo driver dead when he got out to investigate. The mental patient fired five rounds into the limo. He said later that, for reasons that seemed inexplicable to all, he needed to frighten the princess. "And it turned out," Graham said, "that the limo driver had little or no training in ambush and abduction. He should never have stopped for a compact. He could have simply pushed it out of the way."

  That was our final ambush option and there were two methods. The first in
volved simply pulling up to the blocking vehicle and pushing it out of the way. That was if we felt that an abduction would take place only if we got out of the truck. The second method was more spectacular. If we felt that the ambush party was armed, if there was no way to turn and run, no way to drive around, then we could, at our discretion, floor it and crash through. "I like the heavy crash bar you have on the front," Graham said. "Get up some speed and hit the blocking vehicle at its lightest point. Hit it where the engine isn't."

  Aside from ambushes, we could very well run into a riot or two. We knew there were civil disturbances every couple of weeks in Panama, not to mention a tense situation at the border of Peru and Chile, and another at the Peru-Ecuador border. What would be happening in Central America when we got there was anyone's guess. Riots could be vexatious and Graham suggested, quite sensibly, that we flee the scene immediately. "The longer you stay as a riot develops, the less you look like an innocent bystander."

  Graham had once found himself in just such a situation. There was a crush of people behind him and police lines were forming in front. "I just walked toward the police and they parted to let me through. It was fairly obvious that I wasn't involved and just wanted to get out of there."

  Most Latin American civil disturbances, Graham felt, were pretty ritualistic in nature. They generally happen in some major square, a gathering place, usually the site of past riots.

  The ritual of the riot, in Graham's experience, went something like this:

  People gather.

  The police form lines.

  There is a period of mutual provocation.

  The police overreact and beat the hell out of everybody. Or they gas the demonstrators. Hose them down. Sometimes they fire into the crowd.

  So it was best to avoid the ritual riot square. "You see reports on television—people getting clubbed or throwing rocks at police—and you assume that the entire country is in turmoil. But usually it's just one specific area—a square, a plaza—and three blocks away, nothing is happening."