by Moulton, CD
“He said he has a friend who would help us if we ever needed help. You are that friend, Clint Faraday?”
“Yes. I am here because I heard there was trouble from some gringos that was to the point the people were shooting down the planes of a certain type. You have shot two that are not involved in any way. I want to find who you seek. I’ll put a stop to them.”
“We will talk tomorrow. Tonight we sing and tell macho lies.”
“Yes. Like the six young women who drive me crazy with their demands of constant sex. It can be a great burden to be so sexy to so many women.”
These kinds of things were stories for fun. Everyone knew they were just that and tried to make a better one. Clint had given them a hard one to top!
It was a great night. They didn’t use alcohol, but they did have a plot where they grew some good pot. It was used only on special occasions and for medicine, particularly for eye problems. The Indios have used it for many centuries for medicine. They used it for relaxation and recreation very rarely. That they brought it out for Clint was another example of how he was accepted and liked by the people here. He liked them, too.
Tomorrow was soon enough to start his investigation. He would have full cooperation. He had trust – both ways, for and from.
Questions
It rained in the early morning hours and was still drizzling at five thirty, when he awoke and went outside to the little fire where Roso had fresh coffee (Really fresh! He had dried and mashed it only the day before!) brewing. He, like Silvio in Cusapin, put in a few cacao beans when he mashed the coffee beans. It gave the coffee a very pleasant taste.
They went to the river to bathe and caught a nice large fish of a type Clint didn’t know. It would be their lunch. Roso had a girlfriend who would cook it for them. She could use the large pot Clint brought.
The Indios have no ownership of useful items. Roso would own the hat, but not the silverware or pans and such. Everyone would use those things, though they would stay mostly in his house. When anyone needed a large pot, they would go to his house. If it wasn’t in use they would take it. Everyone would know they had it for when it was needed by anyone else.
They would discuss the interlopers after lunch. Clint would spend the morning helping Roso or anyone else who could use a hand in something. He mostly helped harvest yuca and plantains. Roso had a large plot of beets and potatoes. He had onions and garlic and a few other root crops. The next plot had several varieties of peppers, picante and sweet, and tomatoes of three types. Next was beans of several varieties. There was a plot of sugar cane near the river. The soil was rich here, the main reason the village was here. What they didn’t use in the village was traded to others or sent once a week to a (relatively) nearby town for sale. They used the money to buy rice, salt and a few other items, such as soap and brushes – and machetes. Those were the basic tool used on the comarcas. The jungle encroached in almost no time, meaning it required constant trimming. Monkeys came to watch and parrots of three types were noisy neighbors.
Clint loved this place. It was paradise on a par with Cusapín!
They went in for lunch around noon. Nita, Roso’s twenty-something girlfriend, had made a delicious meal of rice and red beans with fried fish and a soup with yucca, potatoes, onion, green peppers, white beans and fish. This was a typical meal. Often, the meat would be chicken or iguana. Pork or beef was only when they came from a town and only that day. Their cows and pigs were sent to market when they had too many. The cows were milked and the milk used the day it was taken. They made some cheese, but not much. Without refrigeration, it would spoil too quickly.
Everything was here for a very easy and pleasant life. The Indios didn’t need to ask when there was any work to be done. It is part of the culture that everyone did their part. Even the children had work to do when they were seven or eight years old. It was an expected thing and not questioned. They share almost everything – and that included work.
Clint remembered when JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That was the “always” philosophy of the Indigenos on the comarcas. Substitute “puebla” for “country” and you had the philosophy down pat. The Indios didn’t have the greeds of the “civilized” world to contend with.
Clint loved this place and these people. He could happily live here for the rest of his life – which was a lie. He would revert back to wanting things and knew it. He could be happy for a few months, or even a year, but it would go sour. He knew it. That caused an emotional ache inside him.
Philosophical time’s over! Time to meet and discuss what was going wrong for the people here. He definitely would do everything in his power to stop it.
“You know of the trouble with the copper,” Eladio said. “We had much trouble because they wanted to open-pit mine on our land. We would not and we will not permit it. We know of the methods to get the attention of other countries. They would have to come and kill many of us to have that kind of mine here. The world would then refuse them business.
“We know the copper is important to Panamá, and we know it must be mined. We only want it done in a way where the whole area will not become a wasted poisonous sore on the earth.
“We think it is the same people from another place who discovered the copper. They have found something here. They have no conscience, except for money. They will not aid Panamá, only themselves. They have now come here to demand things from us and to threaten us.
“That is what the government does not tell you. You do not know, or you would not be here unless to help us.
“They cannot intimidate us with their guns and armies. Their armies cannot do anything in this kind of place and we can have guns. They think they can come in the avions and shoot people and we cannot stop them.
“We can shoot, too. We told them to go and to not again come onto the comarca. They came in an avion and shot two people. We told them we would kill ten of them for every one of us they killed. We will not allow their avions over the comarca.
“You said the two who were shot are not involved. That is perhaps true of the one that did not fall. It is not true of the other, which did fall.”
“This is determined to be fact?” Clint asked.
“Yes. The one was the pilot and the other was one who shot Juan and Beto. He was shooting at us when we shot him down. He was not killed when the avion fell. Only the pilot. He was dead two minutes after it fell. There are eighteen to go before it is again even.”
“Is the only way to tell you which are theirs are the blue and white avions?”
“Blue and white with the floaters beneath and the symbol on the tail,” Roso said.
“I was told of no symbol.”
“No. The government does not want anyone to know. It would show they knew who those people are and what they are doing.”
“What is the symbol?”
Eladio was handed a cell phone with a camera. Clint was shown the wreckage of the plane they shot down. It wasn’t in bad shape, but the cockpit was pierced with a large limb that the pilot was impaled on.
“It would appear that the modern cellulars with the cameras do have some use,” Eladio confided.
The symbol was clear on the last picture. It was a yellow flower with a lightning bolt going through it. It would be small, about ten inches in diameter. There were letters just under the symbol, but Clint couldn’t read them. He said he wished he had a way to charge the batteries in his computer, so he could download and blow them up.
“We can charge the batteries. We have the solar panel to charge the cellulars,” Roso said. “It is slow, but you will not need a very large charge to download the pictures.”
Clint agreed. He also would charge his own cellular. Genio would have to come up with an explanation as to why he didn’t tell Clint about several things. The way he’d acted, he probably didn’t know. If some bigshit with the government wanted to cover up things it would be easy to do so. He also wan
ted to know what they found here.
He chatted awhile, but wouldn’t make any suggestions until he knew what it was about and what they were up against. It could get very dangerous if some of those old crooked powerful politicians were involved. If they controlled the information the police received it would be a noninvestigation. Clint remembered the trouble over the land theft from Dave. It drug on and on. The lawyer he had originally was actually being paid by the ones who falsified the papers to drag it out until it was turned over to the, in effect, dead file department. When he learned of that, he got another lawyer who went to the fiscalia to learn that they had also apparently bribed the judge to close the investigation.
Clint suddenly had another question he wanted answered.
“What kind of gun do you have that can shoot that effectively from that distance?”
It was a question that was definitely not going to be answered, not because they didn’t trust Clint, but because they had sworn to never give the information to anyone. That meant they would never give the information to anyone.
Four hours later the computer had enough of a charge to download the camera and his cell phone had enough charge to use – but there was no signal there. He blew up the symbol to read the letters, GHKBHSA. It was a corporate plane. He was sorry he didn’t have Genio take him to see the plane with the bullet holes in it. If that one had the symbol someone owed him a few explanations.
“Roso, did you see any of those people here? Did they say what they wanted, in any way?”
“They came, two of them once and three once, to say they were going to bring in some heavy tractors and so forth here to our village because there was noplace closer to where they were going to work to bring it in and they couldn’t land those heavy avions on the lake. They did not ask could they bring it. They said they were bringing it.
“Paulo told them they had no permission to bring anything onto the comarca and certainly they had no permission to work, even with a machete.
“The fat one – Victor, they called him – said they could go anywhere they liked anytime they liked for whatever reason they liked on national land. I said this is not national land, it is the comarca.
“He was an obnoxious self-important ass! He said they had already spent more than five million dollars studying their project and weren’t about to let us cheat them for more money.
“Rudolfo said we have no use for their money. They would not come here for any reason.
“The one they called Allen said anyone who tried to stop them would die and rot on the spot.
“I said for every person they hurt here, ten of them would be hurt to the same degree. If they killed anyone, ten of them would die. We all told them to leave and to not come back.
“The one they called Victor said to show us who is the chief here and the one they called Blackie – he was mostly the flyer of the avion – pulled a pistol from his pocket, but Naldo was right there and took it away from him We then drove them to their avion on the lake with the bamboo whips. The fat pig squealed like a pig! I thought his heart would stop before we got there. He was red in the face and couldn’t breathe, but they got there. We didn’t hit them, except at first, when they refused to go. They left.
“The next day the avion was back, low over the trees. Enrique and Somos were shot.
“We called a friend who had said he would make something when they were going to mine the copper that would make it impossible for them to use any equipment. It would make holes in even the biggest. He gave a messenger the thing and told him how to use it. It is not large and ... is very certain.
“We find it really will make holes in things. It makes holes in the avions from three kilometers away!
“We do not want this. If the government tries to come onto the comarca we will use it then, too. If they make those ladrones stay away there will be no more problems.”
Clint nodded. He went to the top of the nearby mountain later and called Genio to tell him to send the chopper. There were some very serious questions that had to be answered before he could decide what to do – which damned well could be to help these people shoot down any planes that flew over the comarca at less than ten thousand feet.
The rest of the day and night were spent in getting to know the people. They were as simple, pragmatic and fatalistic as most of the Indios. They were very intelligent and wanted nothing more than to be left alone to live their lives with dignity.
Clint meant to see they were left alone and that they could live their lives with dignity.
How?
The chopper came about an hour after dawn. Genio was in it, so Clint introduced him to his new friends. He told them he would try to have the planes stopped and would try to find who was doing this and what they had found.
“I will come back here soon. Try to find exactly where they plan to do anything. See if they left anyone there.”
“Genio will help with this? It is certain?”
Genio looked shocked when Clint replied, “I will have to see. It will depend on the complete honesty on all of our parts. If there is evasion or lying that person or those people are enemies. Because of what has already happened I will have to know more before I can honestly say this or that one is a friend.”
Genio was very quiet as they got on the chopper and headed back. He finally said, “Clint, you are a friend. What is wrong?”
“Did you see that plane that had the bullet holes in it?”
“Only from a long distance. I did not examine it, personally.”
“How did you determine that the pilot wasn’t involved? That he was from France? The first was from Brasil?”
“It was in the papers presented. The one from France, Duquesne, was with a passport from Argentina. He has a residency there for six months of the year. The Brasilian, Madeira, is from Brasil.”
“The registry of the planes supported that?”
“The planes? The one from Argentina was the only one I read the papers of. It was a private small plane from Argentina that was leased by Duquesne. He was the owner and leased it to himself so he could use it as a legal business deduction. He told me that because we have nothing to say about taxes in Argentina here.”
“It didn’t seem strange that he was using a business plane here in Panamá when he wasn’t here on business? Just a tourist?”
“I never thought about it, to be honest. I agree, now, that it should have caught my attention.”
“Is the plane still here?”
“Yes. It is being repaired. Duquesne is staying at the Hotel Europa.”
“I have to see that plane. I believe you’re telling the truth, so someone’s lying their ass off to you. Those people killed two Indios. I have to know what it’s about. I have to know who Blackie, Victor and Allen are.”
“Possibly Victor Karnovich? The Ruso who sometimes is with Duquesne?”
“A fat obnoxious asshole pig?”
“To be kind to him, but to insult pigs.”
“He’s the one who ordered that the Indios be killed. I think I want to know everything there is to know about that one.”
“He is supposed to be Ruso mafia. We don’t have anything we can charge him with.”
“You will. Soon!”
They flew into Albrook and went to the hangar where the plane was being repaired. The man working on it said the shots were certainly high-powered! They went through the wing, through steel braces and out through the top without even expanding! That meant very high-point titanium-steel slugs and a tremendous muzzle velocity.
“Not expanding?” Clint asked.
“Yeah. The hole was smooth and exactly the same diameter the last place it hit as the first. Any softer slug or one at a lower velocity will mushroom or fragment as it penetrates. This one didn’t. It’s like it was done with a laser beam, you know? I know none of them would be that effective at more than a couple of feet.”
“I don’t know of any such thing, either,” Clint replied. “I begin to b
e suspicious of something ... two things I was told. It would fit with something else someone once told me. It would pretty well fit with the personality, too. Thanks for the information!”
They were walking away when Clint shook his head and said, “We might be in one hell of a fix! I hope it stays where it is, which can’t happen if we don’t stop it now.”
“Just tell me what must be done to stop it now and it will be done! Immediately!” Genio cried. “There is a company logo on the tail! This is not a private aircraft!”
“See that no plane of any type flies lower than ten thousand feet over that comarca. See that no one who even might maybe just possibly be tied into that company or any that does business with it goes onto the comarca for any reason.”
“I can do some of that. Is it because someone is taking a new science fiction weapon onto the comarca? I do not like your reaction, even a little. You seem actually frightened – and Clint Faraday fears nothing nor no one!”
“The weapon’s there, already. I don’t want anything to happen that could get it out of the Indios’ hands. I don’t want anyone else to even suspect it exists. Believe me, I can’t picture how ... I’m just connecting things I’ve heard and the people I’ve heard them from and about ... it would fit the personality. Christ almighty, this is one hell of a scary thing, no matter how you look at it!
“Why in fucking hell does this kind of thing happen in Panamá among the Indios? Why isn’t it in Germany or Russia or somewhere you’d expect to find ... Christ!”
“Well, you do have Victor. He’s Ruso, but I think not the science type. Maybe a business mogul who is used to people moving as he says when he says as far as he says in the direction he says. He doesn’t ask, he tells. They say KGB. I tend to believe that.”
“That seems to be what everyone sees in him. We’ll have to get him used to taking orders, not giving them. Where does he live?”
“On one of the private islands, but he stays at the Hotel Europa when he’s ... as does Duquesne. So!”