The Green Cathedral

by Kerry Mcdonald

  The first one must have at least run the sedan’s license number and reported something suspicious, thought Abel. That was good. Maybe the cops would get rid of his tail for him.

  No sooner had he thought it, though, than he found that another police car, this one unmarked, had turned on its lights and siren between him and his pursuers.

  Well, I am driving a stolen vehicle in flagrant excess of the posted speed limit.

  He spotted the big, sweeping left turn where Carrera 1, now called Calle 70, curved into the airport environs. He sped up suddenly and flew around it, catching the cop car off guard. He came almost immediately to a street where well-lit signs directed returning rental cars to turn right. Abel turned left instead, and then right almost instantly, went down the street for a block, then parked near a small park, squashed in with many other cars. After sitting with the engine off for well over a minute, Abel decided he must have lost the police car. He had no idea what might have happened to the cartel hitmen.

  Abel got out of the Kia, patted it affectionately on the hood, grabbed his backpack, and locked the doors before tossing the keys on the back seat and slamming the back door shut. He walked calmly toward the airport drop-off area, a mere block away. He figured he was pretty safe for now. The police didn’t know who he was or what he looked like, and the cartel hitmen had hopefully been waylaid long enough by the Cartagena police that they would no longer be a factor.

  As he crossed the street through a menagerie of cars, taxis, small trucks, and shuttle buses, though, he discovered that a couple of men in jackets and jeans were walking toward him almost immediately.

  Damn, they’re everywhere, he thought, and they do know what I look like!

  He saw a policeman patrolling nearby and walked swiftly toward him.

  “Por favor!” he called. The policeman came toward him, and the other two backed off, but not far. “Can you please take me to the ticket counter? I don’t know where to go.”

  The policeman pointed toward a couple of sets of automatic doors. “In there,” he said.

  Abel became agitated. “I know ‘in there,’ but which one will take me to Haiti?” he retorted. “I don’t know if any of the airlines go to Haiti, and I have important business there tomorrow.”

  The policeman sighed, then signaled for Abel to follow him inside, which he did, as did the jeans-and-jackets guys.

  Abel was becoming increasingly frustrated. It wasn’t like he couldn’t handle the guys, but doing so in the middle of an airport’s ticketing area without being seen would be tricky at best. And who knew if others were around? The policeman left him at the counter for the SALSA d’Haïti airline, and the jeans-and-jackets guys stood on the other side of the ticket area, leering at him.

  “Fuck it,” said Abel to himself. He ditched his place in line and headed for a public restroom close to a nearby security clearance complex. A furtive glance back confirmed that the jeans guys were following, along with one other man who was in between them and Abel.

  Abel entered the restroom, and as soon as the other man came in, Abel grabbed him, hauled him to a bathroom stall, and shoved him in.

  “Lock the door and don’t come out,” he ordered.

  The terrified man complied. Abel turned now to see the boot of one of the jeans guys just pushing open the door. Abel rushed at the door, smashed the guy’s foot with it, then flung it open, threw the howling man inside, and slammed the door in the face of the second guy. In seconds, Abel extracted the knife that the smashed-foot guy was now trying to brandish, despite barely being able to stand, and used it to slit the guy’s throat. Then he turned to face the second man, who furiously charged him through the main door, also with a knife. Abel dodged the blade and slammed his fist into the guy’s larynx, creating a sickening crunching sound. As the guy unsuccessfully gasped for breath, Abel dragged him into another bathroom stall, threw him on the toilet seat, and left him to die. He did the same with first man, who was rapidly bleeding out and nearly unconscious. He closed both stall doors, then banged on the first man’s stall as he left.

  “You can come out now,” he said, then disappeared out the bathroom door.

  Back in the expansive ticketing lobby, Abel quickly slipped out a different door than he’d come in. To his surprise, what he was looking for came in a familiar form. The car with the unmistakable Uber sticker on its front windshield was a Kia Soul, this one a delicious-looking chocolate brown. He hopped in.

  “Where do you need to go, señor?” asked the driver, a young man probably in his twenties.

  “South, on Route Ninety until we’re well out of the city,” said Abel. He tossed a hundred onto the front seat. It was the equivalent of three hundred thousand Colombian pesos. “I trust this will be sufficient for a good thirty or forty kilometers.”

  “Sí, señor!” replied the driver enthusiastically.

  “Bueno,” said Abel.

  As the driver pulled away, Abel watched tensely for a while, still not sure if other cartel hitmen might have been posted at the airport and seen him leave. After ten or fifteen minutes of checking the car’s rearview and turning around to actually see the traffic behind, it was apparent that no one was following them. It looked like it was a clean getaway.

  Abel pulled out his secure smartphone and saw he had a text message from Dolan, Victor Garza’s second-in-command at the post. Abel’s jaw dropped at what he read:

  Garza killed in seizure operation. Assuming command until replaced. Apprise of mission status when able. Avoid airport. Use scenic routes.

  Abel was stunned. Victor was dead. But even more shockingly, before he died, he apparently had told Dolan that he had assigned Abel to the Costa Rica mission. Victor had not told Dolan about Abel’s treachery! Dolan now was advising Abel about the best way to get out of the country and avoid cartel reprisals rather than ordering him in to face justice for collaborating with Don Vicente’s cartel. The implication of it all nearly took Abel’s breath away as he stared at his phone. Eventually, even as the full impact had not yet sunk in, Abel texted back.

  Mission status en route via scenic routes. Able to avoid cartel reprisal attempts. Sorry about Garza. You’ll be a fine acting post commander, Dolan.

  Abel stowed his phone, then closed his eyes and put his head back as his driver took him out of Cartagena. Twenty minutes later, Abel told the young man to stop at the tiny bus depot in a town called Aroja. The two got out, and Abel made the young man an offer he couldn’t refuse. He’d buy the Kia for $10,000 in cash and be on his way while the driver took the bus back to Cartagena. Either that or he’d be forced to steal the Kia and kill the driver to cover his tracks. The guy was smart. He took the money. Abel grabbed some water, fruit, and snacks from a nearby convenience store that was open late, then continued his journey south.

  SAN JERONIMO

  5

  —

  Abel was now in one of his favorite situations—on the road, by himself, heading out on a mission. It had been his preferred modus operandi ever since he’d failed to make it back on to his SEAL team two years before. Since being with the DEA in Cartagena, Abel had, of course, been civil and professional with the other agents at the post, but he’d never quite clicked with anyone on a personal level. Indeed, his conversation with Victor Garza earlier that night was as private as he’d ever gotten with anyone in Cartagena, DEA agent or no. Victor had been right—nearly dead right—about him. He was drifting, floating aimlessly around in the moral cesspool that DEA agents dove into every day, easy pickings for the crocodiles that swam around in it. And were it not for Victor, he’d have been devoured already, either by the cartel, whom he’d failed, or by the agency itself, whom he had betrayed. Victor had single-handedly spared him from it all—in one night, no less.

  Abel shook his head at the thought. Why in the hell would a guy do something like that for him? He’d screwed up, after all—screwed up r
oyally. Abel had learned in the SEALs that if you screwed up, you were fucked, and not just you, but everyone else who depended on you. The world was dangerous and unforgiving, and people who didn’t get that, or refused to understand that, always ended up fucked in the end. Why had this one man decided to mess with the natural order of things? And he’d gotten himself killed in the process! There was a side of Abel that wished he could thank Victor when he thought of that, but he dismissed it quickly. It made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t understand it, and there were more important things to be thinking about at the moment.

  And so Abel drove on through the Colombian night, down highways that were narrow and traveled on by few. He passed through a couple of bona fide cities on his way south, the brightness of their lights nearly blinding him, and countless little villages that he had almost traveled entirely through before he even realized they were there. He had practically no idea what the country looked like. It was pitch dark everywhere that his headlights didn’t pierce, and so it was hard to tell whether he was going through forests or open plains, farmland or rancheros where cattle might be grazing. It certainly wasn’t a jungle, but that was about all he knew.

  As time passed, he thought of other things, more immediate matters, like his present situation, and what he’d have to do to acquire those things that he didn’t have, and when. As to the current situation, it wasn’t that bad, but far, far from ideal. He had the clothes on his back, a pair of good tennies on his feet, his usual weapons that he never went anywhere without—meaning his Glock 19 compact 9mm handgun and two spare magazines, his SOG SEAL Team Elite all-purpose knife, and his Walther PK super-small handgun on his leg in honor of one of his movie heroes, James Bond—and a serviceable vehicle. But other than that, things looked bleak. Food, water, and heavier-duty clothes and footwear would be essential. Some raingear and a more durable backpack to haul everything would be nice.

  His ace-in-the-hole asset was his money, the now $40,000 in cash stashed in his backpack, as well as the additional $200,000 in his secret offshore bank account. The cash alone was the kind of money that could get him everything he needed and more, as well as get him to his final destination in one piece if he was careful. Or it could disappear in a heartbeat if he got careless with it and made himself a magnet for thieves, who would be hiding in the shadows virtually everyplace he’d be going from now on. He reminded himself to stash rolls of it in various different places on his person, just in case the worst happened.

  Another resource, mostly unknown to Abel but reputed to be reliable, was a small network of DEA assets stationed in strategic places on the way between Victor Garza’s post in Cartagena and the various DEA posts in Central America. Abel was heading for one of those assets now, a pilot based at the tiny airport in Vista Bonita, a small town on the Colombian coast of the Gulf of Darién, a backwater of the Caribbean that must be crossed to get from Colombia into Panama. That would allow Abel to board transportation at a place well away from the typical hubs where cartel assassins may be lurking, and also to get over the gulf and into Panama in a fraction of the time it would take if going by sea, as most people did.

  The reason why Abel didn’t simply drive into Panama was that there literally was no possible way to do it. The border between Colombia and Panama, for nearly fifty kilometers on either side, was covered with a trackless morass of swamps and jungle known as the Darién Gap. It was called the Darién Gap because it was the one place in the entire length of the great Pan-American Highway, which stretched all the way from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the southern tip of Argentina, where there was actually a gap in the roadway. The pavement stopped at the terminus of a long, shaky footbridge across the wide Chucunaque River in the heart of the tiny town of San Jeronimo in Panama, then started again on the Colombian side in another town called Turbo, the central hub for people making water crossings of the Gulf of Darién. Both would likely be patrolled by cartel hitmen looking for him.

  The Gap itself had no roads at all, not even Jeep trails. The only transportation across it was either on foot (and be sure to bring your sharpened machete) or hollowed-out, flat-bottom wooden river canoes, the main form of transportation for the various indigenous tribes in the area and others who’d built fledgling plantain and banana farms there. Danger lurked everywhere for the uninitiated in this trackless jungle. Poisonous frogs and scorpions hopped and scurried alongside fer-de-lance snakes and fire ants. Animals from wild pigs to pumas prowled the thick undergrowth and lofty tree branches. Even the trees themselves could be dangerous, the ubiquitous black palm’s bark bristling with sharp barbs that were coated in disease-carrying bacteria. The national park within the Darién was a UNESCO World Heritage site for its pristine, pre-Colombian jungle terrain and preservation of the culture of its indigenous people, but like many natural wonders, it was intensely wild, with no regard for the tastes of civilized humans.

  Despite these, the biggest reason for someone like Abel to avoid the Gap was that it had for decades been the domain of the cartels, where smugglers from Colombia could move their product along into Panama and points north without fear of official interference. In recent years, though, the elite Panamanian police force known as the PNP had begun to crack down on this illicit activity, at times turning the Gap into a guerrilla war zone. One’s mere presence without the specific permission of the PNP would land you in jail, or perhaps even in a grave, and likewise, a chance encounter with cartel guerrillas could bring with it an even more gruesome fate. Agent Dolan apprised Abel of this in a voicemail that Abel listened to over his car’s speakers as he drove.

  So the plan was, according to the voicemail and subsequent texts from Dolan, to board a plane in Vista Bonita, clear the gulf, and fly as far as the pilot was able to take him. Dolan estimated that he could make it as far as the Costa Rican border, perhaps even farther, depending on the plane. This would get him well clear of Colombia and, most likely, any cartel thugs. It sounded terrific to Abel. After being on the run all night, after a harrowing evening the night before, he could use a little snooze time on an airplane.

  But Abel’s heart sank as soon as he parked the Kia. The lone plane on the runway near Vista Bonita was a tiny single-engine Cessna Skyhawk, a four-seater usually only used as a pilot-training aircraft. The man whom Abel presumed to be the pilot came running out of a small adobe building alongside the runway.

  “Hola! Hurry, ándele! We must go immediately!”

  Abel swung himself out of the Kia and grabbed his backpack. “What’s the rush?”

  “Get in. Get in! There’s no time to explain.” The man, who was short and probably in his sixties, tossed Abel a heavy leather jacket with sheepskin lining similar to a World War II flight jacket. Abel looked at it as if it were an alien life-form, then grabbed the arm of the bustling little man and swung him around.

  “Listen, whoever you are, I’m not setting foot inside that little toy airplane of yours until you tell me what the situation is here,” he growled.

  The man sighed. “My name is José, and the situation is that my petrol pump is not working, and the man who is coming to fix it is coming later today, but if I’m not here, he will not fix it, and I will go another week with no petrol pump, which means that I will once again only have one tank of fuel to make it through the week. This is terrible. I have crops to dust, mail runs to make, people like you to fly across the gulf. I cannot afford to run out of petrol again.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Abel, alarmed. “Are you saying that you’re out of fuel?”

  “No, estúpido!” he cried. “But I will be once we land in San Jeronimo. There, I’ll refuel, and then I will come back, and if I miss the man who is going to fix the pump, I will only have what’s left in my tank to last the week.”

  “San Jeronimo!” Abel was furious. “You were supposed to take me all the way to Costa Rica.”

  “Ha!” José laughed. “That is, how you say, hilarious.” He put his
own leather jacket on and started to climb into the little pilot’s seat.

  “I can’t go to San Jeronimo! It’s dangerous,” yelled Abel. The guy was strapped in. He was serious.

  “Not if you don’t cross the bridge into the Darién. The only other things that are there are little concrete and wooden houses and a few cantinas and shops and fondés where you can eat really cheap. There’s even a PNP post there next to where the old Spanish fuerte is. They issue permits to go into the Darién and send out patrols to watch for cockroaches trying to enter the country from the jungle. How could you be safer?” He turned the ignition, but the plane failed to start.

  How about landing somewhere on the other side of the border with Costa Rica? Abel thought.

  This was turning into another nightmare, and he’d barely gotten over the one the night before. José tried the ignition again, but the engine refused to turn over.

  “Aiee! Sometimes this happens, especially when low on fuel. You go, give the propeller a pull.”

  “A what?” asked Abel incredulously.

  “A pull! You know . . .” He mimicked someone pulling down on the propeller.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Abel grumbled to himself as he set his backpack down and moved to the propeller.

  “Not on that side, the other side,” yelled José. “You want to get your arm sliced off?”

  Abel did as he was told. José turned the ignition and Abel pulled, but it was hard, and the propeller wouldn’t budge. The plane’s engine sputtered.

  “Again!” cried José.

  This time, when José turned the ignition, Abel gave the propeller a mighty yank with both arms, then jumped to the side as the engine revved and the propeller became a whirling blur.

  Abel walked back around the plane, retrieved his backpack, and grabbed the leather jacket.