The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller

by J. M. Porup

  “The lake pirates.” He waved a limp wrist at the water. “Prey on the villagers. It was for show, don’t you see? Not to actually be used, not against…” He shrugged, left the thought unfinished.

  I stood, kicked the bottom of Michael’s boot. “It was just him, then. No one else. He did all this.”

  A miserable nod. “Yes.”

  Aurora asked, “Any idea why he started shooting?”

  Victor snorted a long strand of bloody mucus back up his nose. “The Americans destroy dissent. So much as a peep and the Dissent Suppression Unit will kill you. The things Pitt told me…” He lowered his chin. “Pitt’s dead, isn’t he.”

  I nodded. “Saw the body myself.” The smell of his burnt flesh even now lingered deep in my sinuses.

  “See?” Victor said. “The Americans will have their war.” The hectoring professor slashed the air from his muddy lectern. “Cover up the inconvenient truth. What’s a few dead volunteers in exchange for some cheap lithium?” He laughed, a bitter bark. “Hell, if I hadn’t been taking a crap, he’d have got away with it. Saunter out of here on a boat, report back to headquarters. Get a medal for it, I expect.”

  “What war is he talking about?” Aurora asked me.

  I said, “The US is trying to steal the lithium fields in the altiplano from Bolivia.”

  “Is that why Sven died?”

  “Yes.”

  Victor and I looked away. We stood in silence for a long moment. We watched the bodies, hoping for signs of movement, knowing there would be none. Buzzards circled overhead. Flies drifted in waves from the corpses, sampled our faces, rejected us for being insufficiently dead.

  Aurora strode off toward the boat.

  “Where you going?” I called after her.

  “We got a war to stop, don’t we?”

  TWENTY

  Aurora said, “I think we got a problem.”

  I heaved a cardboard box of canned spinach into the boat, pushed it snug against a twenty-gallon bottle of water. It was all we could salvage from the cave. What a great meal that was going to make.

  “What’s that?”

  A high-pitched whistling noise split the air. She held up her index finger: Exhibit A, Your Honor. Across the water, two Bolivian warships chugged toward us. Half a dozen more approached on the horizon. I felt like a deer crossing a highway at rush hour, doomed to watch death approach, unable to look away.

  The explosion roared in my ears. The sand beneath my feet shifted sideways and I fell to my knees. Pebbles rained on our heads. A crater gaped just outside the cave.

  “Where’s Victor?” I shouted.

  “Gone back for his laptop!”

  Another whistling noise overhead. This is no time to sit around waiting to die, I told myself. Revenge waits for no man.

  “Get down!”

  We threw ourselves face first on the beach. The explosion was louder this time. The sand trembled against my body. A boulder the size of a basketball landed next to my head. My ears rang. I got up on my hands and knees, peered over the top of the beach. The cave had collapsed.

  Aurora took hold of the gunwale. “Get the boat in the water!”

  Our legs churned sand until the icy water covered our knees. I looked back. The houses nearest the cave were in ruins. “The fuck is Victor?”

  “There he is!” She pointed.

  He ran toward us, his combover flopping at his shoulder, laptop under his arm. A third explosion destroyed half the village, blew him flat on his stomach, next to the pile of bodies. The laptop flew from his grip, smashed against the wall of a surviving house. He picked himself up, clawed at the innards of the computer.

  “Come on!” I shouted.

  Victor held up the hard drive, stumbled down the beach, through the water and dove into the boat. I tugged on the motor until it woke, and we roared away from shore. More shells whistled toward the mountain. Houses the volunteers had labored for months to build now disappeared in puffs of splinters. The medical clinic vanished. The pile of bodies evaporated. Cadaverous parts rained around us, plopping in the water beside us, flecking us with bits of toasted gore. I lowered my head against the wind, aimed the boat for the southern shore of the lake.

  “They’re shelling Peru, for chrissakes. They start the war without us? Did the bomb at the mine go off early?”

  “They’re not attacking Peru,” Victor said. “They’re attacking us.”

  “What for? Why do they want to kill us?” Aurora asked.

  “Same reason they killed Pitt. Same reason they killed your boyfriend.” Victor hurled the hard drive into the lake, and slumped into the bottom of the boat. “Michael failed in his mission. Now they have to make sure no one gets out alive.” The spray soaked his combover. He lifted the wad of hair and plastered it to his scalp, thick strands of clotted gray, like rotting coils of intestines.

  “Hang on,” I said, one hand on the tiller. “Those are Bolivian ships. What are you saying, the Bolivians are working for the CIA?”

  “Precisely!”

  “But I thought the CIA was trying to steal the altiplano from the Bolivians!”

  Victor shrugged, eyes half-closed. “Don’t underestimate the CIA. Probably told the Bolivians we’re terrorists or something, get them to do their dirty work.” He slumped lower into the freezing water at the bottom of the boat.

  “Figure it out later,” Aurora said. “Right now, where are we going?”

  I kicked Victor’s foot. “Good question!”

  He shook his head, as though waking from a nightmare. All those dead bodies. I hoped the shock would wear off soon.

  “Puno!” he said finally. Puno was the Peruvian border town, just opposite Copacabana on the Bolivian side.

  “But there’s police in Puno,” Aurora said.

  “Peruvian police,” I said.

  “Peru, Bolivia, doesn’t matter. They’re all against us.” Victor pushed himself up against the bucking gunwale. “Just outside Puno.” He pointed. “There. See those trees?”

  A tight copse of scrubby pines clustered next to a red barn. A giant green peace sign adorned the side of the building. I adjusted our course. We crashed across the waves, propelled by two hundred and ten horses. More shells obliterated all trace of human habitation at the ashram. Machine-gun fire cackled and flashed in the distance, aimed at us, but the trace rounds fell into the lake hundreds of meters away.

  “What’s there?”

  “Transportation,” he shouted. Then added, “You know, you’re lucky you got off the island alive. If you’d stayed, they’d have killed you for sure!”

  The ships were closing the distance rapidly. I aimed the boat for the beach at full throttle. At the last moment I cut the engine. “Hold on!”

  The boat threw itself onto the beach. Holding on was useless. I hurtled through the air, shoulder-planted myself into the beach, got a mouthful of sand for my trouble.

  “Everyone alright?” Aurora asked.

  “Tasty,” I said, tonguing the grit that lodged itself between my teeth.

  Victor trudged up the sand to the building. “This way.”

  He slid open the main door of the barn. The smell of manure was overpowering. Light filtered in through slats in the walls, reflecting off the dust motes. Half-dried llama abortions hung from the rafters. The unlucky llama mothers spat at us from their stalls. Aurora shuffled toward one the color of dirty coal, stroked its mangy fur.

  “You look hungry,” she cooed. “Yes you do. Who feeds you, huh? Who feeds you?”

  My eyes adjusted. Parked in the back corner stood a van covered in burlap tarp. I put my hand overhead and smacked the roof of the vehicle with my open palm. It rang hollow. I said, “Thought you said you had a jeep?”

  Victor stuck his hands into a pile of llama manure, massaged it with his fingers. “Katherine has it,” he said.

  “I thought you said she left. And what are you doing?” I asked.

  He straightened up, a set of car keys dangling in his shit
-covered hands. Strode across the sawdust-scattered floor. Held the keys in my face. “She did. Is there a problem?”

  Aurora waved a hand between our faces. “Yo. Guys. Who’s Katherine?”

  Victor and I glared at each other. I spoke first.

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Wife.”

  She bit her lip. “I see…”

  Victor yanked the tarp off the van. A miasma of llama dander fogged the air. I coughed and sneezed. Put a finger to each nostril and emptied it onto the floor. Wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve. One of the van’s rear windows was missing. The others were covered with black cloth. Llama fetuses festooned the interior. It was the same van, I realized. The van they’d kidnapped me in. Victor hefted a bale of hay from behind the back wheels.

  “So where’s she gone?” I asked.

  “Katherine?”

  “No, the teddy bear I lost when I was twelve.”

  Victor panted for breath. At four thousand meters, every movement was an exertion. He said, “We’ve got another place. Where we can hide. We were worried something like this might happen.”

  “Which is…where?” I asked.

  He wiped his hands on the dirty tarp. “Forgive me if I do not tell you all my secrets on first acquaintance.”

  “You said that at the cave,” I pointed out. “We’re no longer first acquaintances. More like second acquaintances. Now spill.”

  “Alas,” he said, “nor on second acquaintance either.”

  “Let’s just go,” Aurora said.

  “Can’t.” Victor got in the van, started the motor. “It’s in the mountains. Need a jeep to get there.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You two go. Just drop me off at the bus station on the way.”

  “The bus station?” he said. “What do you want to go there for?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Take a bus?” I said. “You go wherever you want. I’m heading back to Lima.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’ll kill you.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “As long as I kill one man first.”

  An explosion outside rattled the building. Bats in the rafters squealed, thundered out of the barn in a cloud of flapping wings, splattering us with guano.

  “They’re shelling us,” Victor shouted. “Come on!”

  Aurora got in and straddled the gear stick. “So where are we going then?” she asked.

  I hopped in beside her and slammed the door. “As long as it’s near a bus stop, I don’t care.”

  Victor reached between her thighs, reversed out of the barn. “I know a guy. In La Paz. Get us a jeep.”

  “But how are we going to cross the border?” Aurora shouted over the roar of the engine. “Won’t they be looking for us?”

  Victor ground the gears, his fist in her crotch. He flung the van around, facing the lake. “You never crossed this border before?”

  “Crossed it last week. Why?”

  “You weren’t paying much attention, then.”

  An explosion shattered the remaining rear window. Splinters of wood and bits of llama, both fresh and dried, hailed down on the windshield. I looked back. The barn no longer existed. Victor spun the wheels, surged onto the gravel road that ran along the edge of the lake.

  Aurora said, “They’re not joking, are they? They really want to kill us.”

  “It’s not a ‘they,’” I shouted. “It’s a him. One man.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Ambo.”

  “Who’s Ambo?”

  Victor braked hard, throwing us against our seatbelts, ending conversation. Aurora braced her hands against the dash. Victor hunched over the steering wheel. He counted to ten out loud, then lurched forward. An explosion shook the van, made us fishtail on the pitted gravel road.

  The bombardment continued. Victor braked at random intervals, accelerated for a few seconds, slowed, advanced. Explosions ripped craters behind us, ahead of us, around us. Each time Victor edged around a crater, I closed my eyes, convinced the gunners would finally get it right, consoling myself that I would disappear in a puff of painless mitochondria.

  An explosion tipped the van sideways onto two wheels, and Victor fought to bring it back to earth. Another shattered the side window, splashing my lap with shards of glass. I picked fragments from my cheek. Don’t let me die yet, I begged the earth. I’ve got one thing left to do.

  “Who’s Ambo?” Aurora asked again.

  “The man I intend to kill.”

  Aurora said, “So you guys in or aren’t you?”

  We sat in line at the border, a long string of trucks ahead of us. The lakeside gravel road had finally curved inland and mounted a paved highway. We had joined a caravan of trucks and buses heading for the Bolivian border. With any luck I should be able to grab a westbound bus at the border post.

  “In?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, “we have a choice.” She turned to Victor. “Don’t we.”

  Victor rested his hands on the steering wheel, his chin on his knuckles. “I’m for it.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Stop the war.”

  I clucked my tongue. “How do you suggest we do that?”

  “Call the papers,” she said. “Expose this to the world.”

  “What planet do you live on?” I said. “You think the scum at the New York Times aren’t working for the CIA? Or any other newspaper for that matter. It’s big business, baby. Money is all that matters to them. The truth?” I farted, and the stink of my rotting carcass filled the van. “Plus, even then, assuming you found an editor who didn’t have the CIA blackmailing him, you’d need proof. How you going to prove there’s a plot?”

  “So we put it online, like Wikileaks,” she insisted. “The net is still free.”

  “For now,” Victor said.

  “That might work,” I admitted. “But you would still need proof. Hard evidence. Where you going to get that?”

  She curled her knuckles tight, pressed them between her thighs. Bowed her head. “There’s got to be something we can do,” she said. “And I don’t care what. Those fuckers killed Sven.” A tear trickled down her cheek.

  She looked so forlorn. I felt sorry for her. I rolled down a window, and cold mountain air swept away my scent. I put my arm around her and pulled her head to my shoulder. “It was nothing personal,” I said. “It was Pitt they were after. Sven was just collateral damage.”

  She pulled away. “And that’s supposed to what, make me feel better?”

  Victor held up a hand. “I like the idea,” he said abruptly. “It’s a long shot, though.”

  “What’s that?” Aurora asked, wiping her cheeks with her fingertips.

  “We can go to the second refuge, where Kate and the others are. Or,” and he lowered his voice, “we can go into the Salar de Uyuni. We can go to the mine.”

  “And do what?” I asked. “Get killed in the crossfire?”

  He held up a cell phone. “Satellite roaming,” he explained. “If we can get video evidence of the bombing, I can send it via satphone. Get it out to the world.”

  “But what does a video of a mine blowing up prove?” I demanded. “How is that evidence of CIA involvement? And how are the Americans planning to frame the Chileans, anyway?”

  “These are all good questions, Horace,” Victor said, and fingered the bruise under his left eye. “I don’t know the answers. All I’m saying is, let’s go and improvise. Document what we can. They aren’t expecting visitors. The mine’s in the middle of nowhere. There must be some kind of evidence we can find once we’re there on the ground.”

  “And even if we do find some evidence,” I said, “what good does it do? By the time the bombing takes place, it’s too late.”

  “Too late to save the mine. True. But if I can get the video to the Bolivians, plus whatever evidence we find, it might be enough to prevent them from invading Chile. We still got,” he
said, and shook his wrist, consulted his watch, “two days before the bomb goes off.”

  “Two days?” Aurora said.

  “Well, a bit less, actually. Day after tomorrow at 11:37 in the morning, what Pitt said.”

  “But the CIA knows you know,” she said. “Knows that Pitt told you that. Wouldn’t they push forward the timer and blow the mine immediately?”

  Victor shook his head. “They are arrogant Americans. They think they can do what they want and get away with it. Why should they change their plans just because of some annoying activists who live in a cave?”

  “We couldn’t just, you know, like, pick up the fucking phone?” My voice rose in a crescendo. “Look under the bed, boys, there’s a fucking bomb there?”

  The truck ahead of us spewed a thick stream of diesel exhaust, ground ahead a few meters, stopped. Victor followed, the van gliding ahead in neutral.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” he said, his voice so quiet we had to strain to hear him. “The Anglo-Dutch management is working with the CIA. They’re afraid of Ovejo. Nationalization. All their work up in smoke, you know? The company wants this war. They’d rather let the CIA sabotage their mine than lose the entire concession. Best case, you call them, they ignore you. Worst case…” He left the thought unfinished.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Go back to Lima. Find Ambo. Stick some jumper cables on his balls. Make the fucker squeal.”

  “Who is this Ambo?” Aurora asked.

  “I told you. The guy I intend to kill.”

  “And who is that?” she insisted.

  “Jeremiah Freeman Watters. The Amm Basderr a tha Yoo Ni Stase a Mareka. Pitt’s father.”

  Aurora gasped. “Assassinate the American ambassador?”

  “Stop him, you stop the whole thing. He’s the key.”

  I didn’t believe a word I was saying, of course. It would make no difference in the grand scheme of things if I killed him or not, although it would sure as hell scratch my itch. But I had no money, no documents and no vehicle. I could use their help.

  “And how,” Victor asked, “do you plan to do that?”