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

by J. M. Porup

  I stood, turned my back on him. Clenched my fist, desperately looking for someone to punch, something to destroy. Through a narrow slit of glass I could see the Japanese tourists smoking, wrapped in blankets, hot mugs steaming in their fists. The Frenchwoman said something and the Dutch backpacker in the llama earflaps laughed, mouth wide, shoulders thrown back.

  Aurora spotted me. Waved. I ducked sideways. Smacked my head against the wooden wall.

  I am such an idiot. All around you people are dying, you yourself want to die, have nothing to live for, your ex-wife is a suicidal environmental terrorist, and all you can think about is this woman. Aurora.

  What would she say if she knew? If I told her? My best friend killed your boyfriend. Thanks anyway for the shag in the jeep. I closed my eyes.

  “I am dying,” Ambo said. Blood pulsed from the wound on his shoulder.

  “I can see that.”

  “No.” He looked away. “Cancer. Six months max. Pancreatic. No treatment. Lots of pain.”

  “No less than you deserve,” I said.

  He nodded. “Time to reflect on my life.”

  “Time to relive your sins over and over again, replay them in your mind until you go mad, until the only thing you crave is death?”

  He pressed his chin to his chest. “I believe in God, Horace. I believe in America. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have doubts. Have I always done the right thing? Am I a bad man?”

  “Well,” I said. “Let’s see. No. And yes.”

  Ambo nodded his head, each downward movement drooping lower than the last. “I loved my wife and now she’s dead. Because of me.” He looked up at me suddenly. “But what if you could end the guilt?” he whispered. “What if, in one good deed, you could wipe the slate clean? Unburden your soul of its weight, and start over?”

  For a time I had thought it was possible. It’s what had sent me on this wild-goose chase in the first place. I had closed that door on Isla del Sol when I knelt over a blond-haired corpse. To rip open that wound once more—to be tortured by false hope—it was more than I could bear.

  “If only,” I said. “If only God existed, and trees were made of chocolate, and the sea was made of beer. And not that crap American dog piss, but decent brown ale.” I stood. “But it’s not, is it.”

  “Please.” Ambo’s outstretched arm was pathetic. “You’re the only one who can do this. Anyone else goes up that mountain, Pitt will blow it up.”

  “So let him,” I said. “He deserves it. So do you. So do I. So do we all.” I held on to the wooden door handle, like a drowning man groping for a life preserver. “Besides,” I said. “It’s not my fight. If the world is doomed to end this way, then let it. The human race has made its bed. Now let it lie in it.”

  Hak Po spoke. “Chinese state pay much your help. Much you like. Never work again.”

  I laughed, let go of the door handle. “You think this is about money?”

  He took a small plastic bag from his jacket pocket. “All cocaine you want. Lifetime supply. No charge.”

  It was tempting. Never have to worry about nightmares again. Spend the rest of my life awake. Able to control the demons that lurked just beneath the surface of the world. I reached for the bag. He drew back his hand.

  “Get high and stay that way,” I said.

  “Exactly. Please.” He held it out to me again. “Take. Sniff snort.” He tapped a finger against his nostril, grinned.

  I held up my hands, stepped backward. Shook my head. “No. That’s too easy. A high’s no good without the gutter in between.”

  I opened the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Lima to look for a new drug dealer, this time hopefully someone who’s not a Chinese spy.” I paused. “Oh, and to celebrate the end of the world.”

  Ambo stood, stretched out a hand to me, but slipped and fell to the ground. He clutched his chest, gasped for air. Hak Po pushed past me, shouting for the medic.

  I bent down to where Ambo lay.

  His bloody fingers smeared my cheek. “There may be no God,” he whispered. “There may be no priest to forgive your sins. But there is one person whose forgiveness you must have. If you are ever to find peace.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “Who’s that? Pitt?”

  “You,” he said, and tapped his finger weakly against my chest. “You must forgive yourself.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The fuck.

  Goddamn fucking bullshit. Twist my arm and send me up this godforsaken mountain. And for all I know, I might just help him press that button, blow the world to kingdom come.

  Boom.

  No more fucking people. Human race dies off, a handful of farmers left to till the soil. Mankind back where it belongs. An end to concrete jungles and the crowds. An end to city living, city morals. An end to all the ugliness.

  An end to me.

  Would that be such a bad thing? I was half-dead already, destroyed in an orgy of chemical self-flagellation. My organs groaned under the onslaught of cocaine, liquor, junk food. I know what punishment feels like. I know what I deserve.

  How many people had died because of me? My killing spree hit an exponential curve in the last week. It began slowly, of course. Data point one: my child, last year. What was her name again? I cringe at the thought. I’ve forgotten her name!

  Liliana. That was her name.

  Then we pick up the pace.

  Lynn. Dead because of me. Because she loved me. Ambo was wrong. It wasn’t his fault. It was mine. If I hadn’t gotten involved with her, she’d be alive today. True, I didn’t strangle her myself. But I might as well have.

  Riding in the jeep to the base of the volcano, I asked Ambo, “So why did Pitt kill Lynn? It was him, after all, wasn’t it?”

  The heart meds the medic gave Ambo seemed to be working. Keep the bastard alive for a little while longer. Let him suffer with the rest of us.

  He nodded. “Went to your apartment. To talk to you. I think,” he said, and closed his eyes, “I suspect he wanted to recruit you for his bomb expedition.”

  I pinched my broken pinkie. The endorphin rush was the only drug available. “He found Lynn there. And something happened. Something snapped. But what? And why? I mean, he killed his own mother, for chrissakes.”

  “You were a bad influence on him, Horace,” Ambo said. “I told you that the first time I met you.”

  A medic pinned a saline bag to the roof with his thumb.

  “Hello?” I said. “Who’s the killer for hire? Not me.”

  “Pitt serves a useful function in society. He makes sure the herd sticks together.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Is that what it is.”

  “You, on the other hand,” he said, turning to me, “serve no useful function in society. A conscience like yours in incompatible with life.”

  “With killing dissidents, anyhow.”

  “Your sense of moral outrage is contagious, son. He’s caught your disease. A fate I wish on no man.”

  I struggled to process this. “So what are you saying, he broke into my apartment to talk to me, found Lynn there, and was, what? So disgusted at seeing her half-naked ass waiting in lust for my cock that he went apeshit?”

  Ambo’s head drooped, marking time to music only he could hear. “Something like that. Yeah. You remember how he killed her?”

  “You don’t mean that—”

  But my throat convulsed and no more words came out.

  Lynn, strangled on my floor.

  Jump.

  Pre-dawn glow creeps in the open window. Pitt stands over me, a knife in his hand, staring at my fist as I twitch and spurt. My face is purple. A hangman’s noose dangles from my neck.

  Jump.

  How do I explain all this?

  The SUV lurched over a rock. Ambo made a noise. The medic fussed. A diamond-encrusted fist pushed the man away. “That’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “Who did he learn it from?”

  I taught him. Showed him. How to wrap his belt around his throa
t. Just enough to give a boost. To come, but not to kill. Weeks after the Hak Po op he came to me, noose in his fist, begged me for my opening lecture in Autoeroticism 101. I gave it to him. My own form of revenge, or so it seemed at the time.

  “It’s about getting as close to death as you can without dying,” I told him.

  “And then what happens?”

  “I see things.”

  “What things?”

  “How can I explain it to you? Life looks different afterward.”

  What monster of the deep had I awoken?

  “It’s not your fault,” Ambo said. “Snap out of it, you hear me? Last thing I need right now is you out there in guilt-trip land.”

  I stared out the window. Razors of acid slashed at my insides. Pitt had come to confess. But I’m no priest. I’m no saint. And when he found Lynn there, and saw my sin for what it was, he knew the truth: there is no way to end the guilt. At least, none in this life.

  “Is that what it was?” I asked the moon, already visible on the horizon. Night was never far off at this altitude.

  “He strangled her with his bare hands. You came home before he could escape. Knocked you on the head, called the police, got the hell out of there. The police find a naked woman, dead, the rope in your bathroom… Sex play gone bad. That’s what Villega thought, anyway. Until I set him straight.”

  “Villega thinks?” I said. It was such an absurd thought, I laughed out loud. I might never see his pimply jack-o’-lantern face again. Grade his ridiculous English homework. Then I remembered those photos he’d shown me, and I stopped laughing.

  Lynn dead. Because of me.

  Who else?

  Who was next?

  The train. The Chinese vendor Red Cap murdered.

  “He very good agent,” Hak Po said. “Family get big pay for loss of husband father. So sorry.”

  So sorry.

  Who else?

  The dead monk in the back of the van. When they kidnapped me, his corpse leaking all over my pants.

  The unnamed spy at the mine Ambo and Pitt were after, the whole point of the Hak Po op. Tortured and murdered by the DSU because of me.

  Paco, skull bashed in by Umlaut while the cops looked on. He was a pickpocket, but he had never hurt anyone. Just a little kid.

  The innocent guests at the Hotel Finski. I could still feel the dead flesh under my fingertips, Sven melting in the noonday sun, the shark-tooth necklace burned into the skinless meat of his neck.

  “You come back now, you hear?” Aurora cried, her arms around my neck.

  “Back in a jiffy,” I said, turning my lips away for her to kiss my cheek, all the while thinking: maybe never. Maybe I’m the one who’ll push the button, not Pitt.

  Then Victor’s massacre on the lake shore. Old men. Children. The little kid with the soccer ball, those empty eye sockets. When Will Be The Leave-Taking, the volunteer who’d volunteer no more. Michael, the CIA tool. And a score of meditating monks, fugitives from the First World, seeking no more than a decent mantra and a well-earned peace, plus a chance to blow up the world. If I hadn’t sent Pitt their way, none of those deaths would have happened.

  And Kate.

  Oh, Kate.

  The SUV zipped its way across the salt flats toward the mountain. The early afternoon sun glared through the smoked glass. The medic jabbed Ambo with a needle.

  A walkie-talkie crackled. “You there, sir?”

  Ambo picked up the radio. “Talk to me.”

  “Missed the banzai, sir,” a gruff voice said.

  The radio hissed. “Come again?” Ambo said.

  “Banzai, sir. Dozen men in robes just went over the top. Suicide charge.”

  “Survivors?”

  “Negative, sir.”

  Ambo and I exchanged glances.

  “Casualties?” he asked.

  “Two down, nothing serious. Shit.”

  A loud popping noise in the background.

  “What’s that?” Ambo shouted, fighting off the medic.

  “Got one taking potshots at us, sir!”

  “Is it a woman?” I asked. I grabbed the walkie-talkie from Ambo’s hand. “I said, is it a woman?”

  There was a pause. “Affirmative. Sniper is female.”

  “Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “Hold your fire!”

  Another pause at the other end. “Those your orders, sir?”

  Ambo held out his hand. I gave him the walkie-talkie. He said, “Hold your fire. Keep your head down and wait for us.” Ambo looked at me, eyelids drooping heavy over his eyes. “Repeat, hold your fire.”

  The rocky four-wheel-drive track wound upward. We lurched along in the backseat. I turned to Ambo. “Something I have to ask you.”

  “So ask.”

  “I may not come down off the mountain.”

  He shrugged. “In which case none of us will either.”

  “That’s not what I mean. There’s something I need to know.”

  Ambo waited.

  I took a deep breath. “Lynn,” I said. “Was that on purpose?”

  “Was what on purpose?”

  “The whole thing. To seduce me.”

  His face went blank. Motionless. “What do you mean?”

  “Was that part of your plan?” I said. Still he didn’t answer. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Did you order her to sleep with me?”

  He looked out the window at the volcano rising huge ahead of us. His lips moved several times before the word slid from his lips.

  “No.”

  We continued in silence.

  The salt flats petered out, replaced by rocks piled high by ancient volcanic belches. In the distance a path zigzagged up the side of the volcano, the dusty trail pounded flat by decades of tourist traffic and, before that, centuries of human sacrifice, Incan priests leading their victims to the slaughter.

  The road ended. We dismounted from the jeep. A soldier ran toward us stooped over. He wore camouflage with a Bolivian flag on the shoulder. The rest of the soldiers huddled behind car-sized boulders, their rifles aimed at an unseen enemy. Up the hill lay the scattered corpses of the brown-skinned, shaven-headed monks. Their robes fluttered in the cold breeze.

  “They die long way from home Tibet,” Hak Po said. He spat.

  A rifle shot rang out. The dust at my feet puffed in a cloud. “Get down!” the soldier shouted. We crouched low and ran for cover.

  Ambo struggled to keep up. He rested against a man-sized boulder. Panted for breath. An American soldier wearing captain’s bars crouched at his feet.

  “Who the hell is this guy?” I said. “American troops in Bolivia?”

  “Military advisor,” Ambo said. He addressed the captain. “What have we got here?”

  The advisor gave me an ugly look. “Single shooter, sir. Not a very good shot. Female. Dressed in black. Not like the others, sir.”

  “She most certainly is not,” I said.

  Ambo held out a hand. “Why did you attack?” he asked. “My orders were, I wanted them all alive.”

  The American straightened, shoulder against the rock. He put his thumbs in his belt. Nodded his helmeted head in the brisk movement of a construction foreman. “Scattered across the hillside in sniper formation, sir. Very clever. Would have had to dig them out of their foxholes one by one.”

  “So you attacked,” I said.

  The captain ignored me. “Would have meant high casualties, sir. Decided to show them the chopper.”

  Ambo said, “You didn’t.”

  “It was a bluff. Those missiles look pretty scary, I guess. Instead of coming out with their hands in the air, they grouped together and did a suicide charge.”

  “Except the woman.”

  The man shrugged. “Except her. Funny thing, though. Didn’t scream. The monks, I mean. Just ran toward us silently. Not a sound.”

  “Except for your gunfire as you shot them down,” I said.

  Ambo stuck two fingers into the breast pocket of the captain’s fatigues, pulle
d out a pack of Hamiltons. He put a cigarette between his lips. The medic had confiscated his unfiltered Camels in the jeep. He glanced at the captain. “You mind?”

  “For a living legend like yourself, sir?” The captain lit the cigarette with a plastic lighter. “They teach your exploits at Langley.”

  Ambo took a puff, held it in his lungs, let it trickle out. He offered the pack to me. I waved it away. I expected suffering in my immediate future. I was probably going to die. I wanted to experience it raw and unadulterated. He handed the pack back to the captain.

  “My fault,” Ambo said at last.

  “How is it your fault?” I said. “Sounds to me like your overeducated grunt here fucked up.”

  “He doesn’t know what’s at stake.”

  “He knows how to follow orders, doesn’t he?”

  The captain said to Ambo, “Sir, I got to put up with this? I don’t need a disciplinary problem on the line.”

  Ambo dropped his hand on the captain’s shoulder, gripped the man’s flesh like a basketball, his thumb along the man’s collarbone. “Friend, this disciplinary problem, as you put it, is about to save the world. Isn’t that right, Horse?”

  “Or destroy it,” I said.

  Another shot rang out, and by instinct we ducked lower, even though we were fully protected by the boulder.

  “Gimme your bullhorn,” Ambo said.

  The captain held it out.

  “It’s for him.” He jerked his head in my direction.

  The captain held the bullhorn out to me grip first, with elaborate ceremony, as though it were a weapon. I took it. It sagged heavy in my hand.

  “What do I say?” I asked Ambo.

  Smoke swirled from his nose. “You want her to come out of this alive? Maybe you should tell her that.”

  I swallowed. Tiptoed to the edge of the rock. Put the bullhorn to my lips. The sudden squawk made two nearby soldiers flinch away from me. Another bullet pocked the side of the boulder. I pointed the bullhorn at the sky.

  “Kate!” my voice blared through the bullhorn. “It’s me!”