The Green Cathedral

by Kerry Mcdonald

  Suddenly, Ron noticed that one in the group of workers was José, a tree cutter from farther down the coast who was clearing land just north of Quepos where a new beachfront motel was to be built. He came up the highway to Playa de Palma a couple of times each week to have American Night with his family. Ron squeezed himself through all the customers eating at his tables to greet him.

  “Ah, José,” he called over the din. “So glad to see you here. So your guys are part of this project for our island?”

  José wiped a milkshake moustache from his face and smiled up at Ron. “Sí, my friend,” he said. “We are all part of a new crew that this businessman has put together. We’re to clear some land on your island here.”

  “So I was told. Kind of a rush job, huh?”

  “Ah, sí!” said José. “We all thought we’d come tomorrow, but we got a call earlier that a boat would pick us up and we’d go in today, and each of us got ten thousand US dollars in cash as a bonus! Pretty great, eh?”

  “So, do you know what’s eventually going to be built there?” asked Ron.

  “No, señor, but I don’t care. I just know we’re clearing land. Some of the other crews are building some kind of structures, but we don’t know. We just do our job, right?”

  “That’s for sure,” said Ron.

  So these men don’t know anything more than we’ve been told, thought Ron. All this secrecy made him worry about the dark speculation he and other community patrol members had heard. The community patrol, as Monti called it, was a group of men and a few women who lived year-round in Playa de Palma and regularly patrolled the roads behind the beach, the beaches themselves, and the road up to the school and the highway each night to keep the community safe. Each wore a bright orange vest with “Community Patrol” emblazoned on it in reflective paint and carried a utility belt that held a police wand, pepper spray, a tactical flashlight, and a holster with a small semiautomatic pistol. Once each week, patrol people had to check in on their own time at the firing range near a big warehouse up by the highway and spend time shooting and practicing self-defense moves with a partner. Several times when Ron had gone there over the past few weeks, he’d heard others talking, usually in Spanish, about Monti getting tired of his small business and reaching out to more big-time kingpins in the region. The talk always centered around the island and something about a waystation.

  Ron wasn’t sure what it all meant, and he certainly had no idea what sort of waystation the men might be referring to. Something was definitely afoot that Monti was not being up front about. Ron wondered if it had something to do with the guest Monti took to the Rio Palma Inn earlier, and the parade of armed men and trucks that had trundled through town not long after.

  Suddenly, one of his waitresses, Marta, a single mother who lived near the river, came up beside him. Ron was shocked at the look on her face: one of utter fear and terror. “Marta, what is it?”

  “You must come to the break room immediately.”

  Marta grabbed Ron’s wrist and yanked him around. Ron could barely wave to his friend José before he was marched through the dining room, through the kitchen door, and into a small room in the back that served as the employees’ break room. Sitting on a chair in a corner, crying, was Marta’s ten-year-old son, Enrique. Marta sat Ron down in another chair that she dragged over from the break room table.

  “Tell Señor Ron, mijo,” said Marta to her son. “Tell him what you saw. He is a good man. He won’t hurt you.”

  Enrique just sat with his hands over his eyes and quietly cried.

  Marta saw Ron’s confusion and pity for the child. “He has made friends with one of the little boys whose family is staying in one of the beach houses at the Rio Palma. He was going to their house to find his friend and play, and he saw something.”

  She turned again to Enrique. “Mijo, you must tell Señor Ron what you saw. Tell him now!” Her words were filled with both understanding and urgency. Enrique finally lowered his hands and peered at Ron with his reddened eyes.

  “I saw two women on the ground beside the second beach house. Neither one was moving, and there was blood everywhere!”

  ***

  Javier finally pulled Señor Forrest’s Jeep into the small dirt parking lot in front of a small building with a crude sign that said “Pablo’s Scuba” on it. The journey had been longer than usual and scary, to say the least. After leaving Playa de Palma, Javier had gotten onto the highway and turned left to go the four miles or so to the scuba school. All had been fine for three miles, but then in front of him, he’d seen the strangest and most frightening thing he’d ever seen on any highway. Driving down the middle of the road was a big pickup truck. Three ugly men were sitting in the bed of the truck. Two were carrying assault rifles, and the other stood leaning on a big machine gun that was mounted in the bed. Javier had slowed his Jeep and pulled to the side to pass the truck, and as he’d gone by it, he’d seen two other ugly men in the cab, both with assault rifles, and another man driving. Javier fought the urge to stare. Staring would get their attention, and these were the kind of people whose attention he definitely did not want. He drove along, gripping the steering wheel a lot tighter than usual, and finally came to his turnoff, but just before he got there, his peripheral vision picked up something odd just down a road that went off to the right, barely visible in the shade of the trees. He turned his head instinctively, but he’d already gone by the road junction and only saw trees. He could have sworn there was another pickup truck with a machine gun in its bed just like he’d seen driving down the road less than a mile back.

  Unnerved, to say the least, he was relieved to make his left-hand turn onto a dirt road marked with a tiny sign that said “Scuba School.”

  Then, however, he got another unwelcome surprise. The school was not just a little way off the main road. The dirt road, barely maintained and filled with holes and dangerous dips and steep little hills, seemed to wind through the jungle for miles. It must have taken him fifteen minutes, going very slowly, to finally reach the welcoming parking lot. There were only a couple of other cars there, also SUVs, and it looked like there was one person inside the building behind the counter. He also noted the little fishing trawler moored to the small pier that extended into the ocean from a tiny beach.

  Señor Forrest’s boat, he thought. He was glad he’d gotten there in time.

  Javier parked in front of the building and went inside.

  “Hola,” he said to the man, who looked to Javier like he had just awakened him. “I have a delivery from the Rio Palma for Señor Forrest, the owner of that boat out there. He is expecting it.”

  “So what? Go ahead. Make your delivery,” mumbled the man, who obviously was not Pablo, the scuba teacher. “You get beat up or something?”

  “Oh, you mean these bruises? No, just fell down the stairs at the inn. Clumsy me!” Javier laughed.

  He then went back out, dragged the duffel bag out of the car, and then suddenly, all hell unexpectedly descended upon him. He heard a loud buzzing coming from the jungle, bullets struck the dirt all around him and whizzed through the trees, and then, dashing into the parking area from the jungle, was Caleb Forrest, running like a madman and shouting and waving his hands.

  “Stop!” he cried. “Stop! Drop that bag. Drop the bag!”

  29

  —

  When Abel and Rimi had turned off the highway, they had both breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed like they had most certainly ditched a trap that had been laid for them by Don Vicente Galvan and his guards, and now, they juked and jolted down the pitted dirt road to Pablo’s, feeling a lot less tense than they had for quite a while.

  The feeling didn’t last long.

  Suddenly, they heard the heavy sound of an old .50 caliber machine gun, and the mini-missile-like rounds kicked up dirt on the road, shattered tree trunks with loud pops, and made hissing sounds passing b
y their open windows.

  “What the hell!” yelled Abel, and he glanced into his rearview mirror. There, barely a hundred yards behind them, was another technical! It must have been very near, for the one they’d seen in the road could never have gotten to where they’d turned off so quickly. Fortunately, it appeared that the treacherous road was making it almost impossible for the machine-gun operator to fire accurately.

  “Shit!” yelled Abel. “I hate it when I’m right. This must be the crew that was going to close the trap on us if we’d stayed on the highway. They would have been a lot closer to the turnoff.” There was more gunfire, this time from an AK-47 assault rifle (Abel had heard too many of those to ever forget their distinctive racket). Once again, bullets seemed to fly everywhere around the Jeep.

  Rimi kept her head down and looked up at Abel expectantly. “So what’s our plan?” she asked.

  “We’ve got to get this Jeep to the dock and unload the stuff onto the boat, and we’ll never do that if that machine gun gets a good shot at us. Those bullets will rip this thing apart like a cardboard box!” Abel yelled as he sped the Jeep up. The increased bouncing up and down and sideways that this caused helped them be a harder target to hit, even if it was bone-rattling. Abel checked the side mirror because the crates of Xilinium were stacked so high it was hard to see out the rearview. The truck pursuing them had sped up, too, but that made their shooting even more ridiculously inaccurate. The man firing the fifty caliber got off a few more rounds, one of which slammed through the Jeep’s tailgate, but a second later, he nearly flew out of the truck.

  “My knife will be inaccurate as well,” Rimi called back. “I would have little control over it because our vehicle is bouncing so much. I could jump out and leap into the truck. I’m much quicker than them.”

  “But there’s five of them plus a driver, and it only takes one bullet in the wrong spot and you’re dead meat, and besides—” Abel stopped himself as he glanced in the rearview again. There was another vehicle, a sedan-style car, lurching down the road several hundred yards behind the machine-gun truck.

  Galvan himself, Abel thought immediately. “There’s a car coming behind the truck. Not sure if they’ll make it. This road might beat it up too much.”

  He returned his attention to the road ahead, speeding up once again. He and Rimi bounced up and down in their seats.

  “Okay, this is what we do. I’m going to get ahead of them a little here, and then I’m bailing out with my rifle. You move in and drive this thing down to Pablo’s. When you get there, heave those things into the boat and get it ready to leave. I’ll be along, don’t worry. It shouldn’t take long to get rid of these clowns. I’ll run cross-country and get there hopefully not long after you. Then we’re gone.”

  He turned to Rimi. She actually looked eager.

  Where has this person been all my life? thought Abel.

  “Okay, we’re coming up to this little flat spot.” Abel grabbed his Mk 16. “See you on the boat!” He threw his door open, fell out so that he was already rolling when he hit the ground, and Rimi seamlessly slipped into the driver’s seat after him. She quickly worked the controls to adjust the seat, then gunned the engine and sent the car forward. She could hear more machine-gun fire, but no bullets zipped around the Jeep.

  They must be shooting at Abel now, she thought. Please stay alive, my dear friend.

  Abel slipped into the thick undergrowth that lined the road. He must have been seen by someone in the truck because a barrage of AK fire peppered the area where he’d hit the ground. Of course, he was no longer there, having run deeper into the jungle as soon as he’d gotten up.

  The truck slowed noticeably, and Abel smiled. He hadn’t wanted to tell Rimi the other reason why he wanted to bail out of the Jeep. He knew that Galvan was after him—him and only him—and that if he bailed, and Galvan knew, then Rimi would be home free with the Jeep’s cargo and would make it safely to the boat. Not that he had a death wish, and not that Rimi couldn’t handle things nearly as well as he in this situation, but he was a guy, and he wanted to keep his girl safe, and he didn’t care how old-fashioned that sounded. That’s the way he was.

  Abel crept from tree to tree through the dense jungle, looking for the perfect spot where he could get off a few bursts of well-aimed rounds at the truck, which was now moving barely faster than he was. He could see everyone with their eyes peeled, staring into the forest, mostly in the wrong place. Abel finally found a spot with a clear view, aimed the Mk 16, and sprayed the bed of the truck with a full automatic burst. A second later, all three shooters in the bed were dead, riddled with bullets. At the same time, the truck sped up. Those inside fired into the forest, but none of them really knew where he was.

  Abel now stepped out from behind a tree beside the road, aimed at the pickup’s back window, and fired several more bursts. The truck spun sharply to the left and then turned over.

  Great, thought Abel. That will block the road for the car behind if it manages to get that far.

  He turned, expecting to either see the car a few hundred yards back or for it to not be visible at all, but suddenly, he got the shock of his life.

  The car had somehow morphed into something like a monster truck. Its chassis was now a good three feet off the ground, with heavy-duty shocks and springs underneath, and its engine roared like an off-road Hemi. Worst of all, he saw something that looked like an M134 20mm Gatling gun mounted underneath. Abel had never felt more like a dead man. His body, if hit directly by the gun’s spinning barrels, which were capable of firing thousands of rounds per minute, would simply disintegrate. He dashed back into the jungle and ran as fast as he ever had on a perpendicular course. At the same time, Abel heard the dreaded buzz of the weapon. The tree that he’d been near was obliterated. It actually fell down—across the road! Abel almost chuckled. That would be tough for even this highly elevated monstrosity to get over. He aimed and fired his weapon at the car’s windshield, but all that he saw were sparks as his bullets bounced off.

  Great, he thought. It really is a tank—bulletproof and everything. What did these guys do, steal a presidential limo?

  Abel watched before deciding his next move. He noticed that the Gatling gun, for all its ferocity, was not on an electrical, remote-control swivel, but something that was hand-operated, perhaps by a steering wheel or a hand crank. It was turning in his direction, but not instantly as a military-grade weapon would. In a split second, Abel knew what to do. As the buzz of the cannon began again and more forest got shredded, getting ever closer to him, he took off running away from the gun’s path, dodging trees, leaping logs, plowing through shrubs, all the way behind the car and to its other side.

  There he dealt with a different threat. A man was standing with his door open and holding an AK-47. And not just a man, a giant man. His head was on a level taller than the freaking jacked-up car! Abel recognized him. It was Don Vicente Galvan’s giant bodyguard who had stood watch when Abel had made that fateful, foolish deal with the devil over a month ago. Was it just that long ago? The giant was just aiming his AK, leading Abel’s path. Abel stopped abruptly, brought his weapon up in a flash, and squeezed off a few more auto rounds. Then he took off again, glancing over to see if any damage had been done. The giant was no longer standing outside the car, and his AK was on the ground.

  Chased inside at least, thought Abel. He continued to race around the car. He leaped the tree that had fallen and ran directly in front of the vehicle. Seeing a door open, he held out his Mk 16 and blindly fired it on auto at the car until his magazine ran out, hopefully once again driving any shooters back into the vehicle.

  Having outraced the Gatling gun all the way around the tanklike car, and with no time to stop and pop a new magazine into his Mk 16, Abel ran through the jungle like a steeplechaser on steroids, dodging trees, leaping over or plowing through bushes, tall grass, fallen logs, sure that the tank, now blocked b
y the fallen tree, would simply turn into the jungle and four-wheel it straight through to the pier.

  He glanced up as often as he could, trying to keep his bearings and not just blindly plunge through the forest. He knew that the road where he’d left it was one of the sections that paralleled the beach, so he ran perpendicular to that last point as much as possible. And then, unexpected help! He caught just a glimpse of Rimi and their Jeep. It was far off to the right, some sun rays glinting off its windshield on a section of road that paralleled Abel’s path. That’s good! Abel knew that the road would soon turn back toward his path and then make a right into the dirt clearing that served as Pablo’s parking lot. If he just angled to his right as he ran, he should end up right near that junction.

  Suddenly, though, Abel could hear pops and zings as bullets flew to his immediate left. He veered right a little and started to zigzag. He knew that the Gatling gun would be just like the truck’s machine gun, almost impossible to aim accurately, but frankly, Galvan didn’t have to be accurate with such a weapon. He could sweep it from side to side like a scythe in a wide arc in front of his tank-car.

  The car’s firing stopped, but the roar of its motor and the crunching of the heavy vehicle on the forest floor continued unabated. Since the sound came from behind him and to the left, Abel figured they must be having a slow go of it, despite their adaptations. He was probably running faster than they were going.

  The buzz came again, this time its effects hitting first to his left, then coming toward him. Abel jumped behind the nearest tree and lay flat on the ground as a blizzard of bullets swept through the jungle all around him. Keeping his head down, he heard the ground explode just to his left, then suddenly the deadly buzz saw tore through branches high in the trees before him and to the right. They must have started firing level, then dropped into a hole, and then pulled up out of it; their bullets pounded the ground before sending a cascade of leaves and small tree branches falling from the trees around him.