He was now at the opposite end of the barge from the jetty and, providing he remained there, shielded by the bulk of the bus, he was out of sight of anyone on the shore, including the sicarios. However he knew that if he remained immersed in the water any longer, he would be in serious difficulties, so at once he hauled himself up so his body was half out of the water, hanging by his fingers, then swung a leg up, hooking it over the gunwale and rolled onto the deck of the barge under the front bumper of the bus. He huddled in the foetal position, conserving what body warmth he had, and was grateful for the heat of the still-warm bus engine just above him.
Within a couple of minutes he heard shouts and then felt the barge begin to move as the crewmen cast off from the shore. There were only two of them on the barge and both were busy at the stern, one using his punt pole to push off from the ramp and through the shallows, and the other steering and running the outboard motor. Harper was still soaked through and shivering from the cold, but he stayed where he was as the barge nosed slowly out into the deeper water of the lake and then increased speed, with the bow wave splashing on to the deck, making him feel even colder.
The barge soon reached the other side and the outboard’s engine note fell away as the crewman eased back on the throttle, letting the barge swing around on the current so it could again approach the jetty stern-first. Harper felt it beginning to turn and heard the other crewmen’s footsteps on the planking of the deck as he began to walk to the prow, carrying his punt pole, ready to push the ferry the last few metres to the jetty. At once Harper crawled further under the bus and, hidden in the gloom underneath it, he peered out at the shore, noting where people were standing in line for the ferry and how far he would have to swim to be out of sight of them. Any stray people further along the shore who happened to spot him would just have to be dealt with as the situation required.
As the barge bumped to a halt and he heard the crewman walk back along the barge, Harper slid out from his hiding place. Crouching low, still hidden from the shore by the bodywork of the bus, he rolled over the gunwale until he was once more hanging by his fingertips. At once the cold again struck deep into him, but he just gritted his teeth as the driver of the bus came on to the barge and slowly reversed his vehicle off. Then, before the vehicles began to be loaded for the return journey, and hoping that the bus driver’s manoeuvres would still be holding the attention of the watchers on the jetty and the shore, Harper let himself drop back into the water.
He worked his way around to the side of the prow, still out of sight of the people on the jetty, and then pushed off as hard as he could with his feet and swam underwater, away from the jetty and parallel to the shore. He kept swimming, using powerful strokes with his arms and legs, as his lungs tightened and the urge to breathe became almost unbearable, then released the last of the air in his lungs in a steady stream of small bubbles. When he could hold his breath no longer, he swung round towards the shore and broke surface just as he started to feel the sloping shingle beach against his chest. He crawled forward, hauling himself out of the water on his hands and knees, then raised his head a little and took a cautious look around.
Two young children who had been playing on the beach right in front of where he had emerged from the water, were watching him, their eyes like saucers. Harper gave them a big smile, and then shot a quick glance back along the shore. There was no sign of any alarm, nor movement towards him from the jetty which now looked to be almost 100 yards away. He turned his head, looking back across the water. The next queue of people waiting to cross was lining up at the jetty on the far side and beyond them he could just make out the figures of the two sicarios, still leaning against the Landcruiser.
He turned back, gave the children another big smile, and then reached into his pocket. He pulled out the few coins he had there and tossed them towards the kids. They fell glittering among the shingle on the beach and the children scrabbled among the pebbles for them, giggling and laughing. Harper got to his feet, ran past them up the beach, around the end of a row of houses and then dived into some scrub behind them. He was still cold to the bone, shivering hard and struggling to focus his mind. He knew that he must be close to hypothermia, so with a quick look around to make sure he was still not being watched, he took off his clothes. He spent a couple of minutes wringing as much water from them as he could and then trying to rub some warmth into his frozen limbs and then put his clothes back on.
He ran up the hillside away from the lake, feeling weak as a child but resisting the siren call from his mind to just sit down for a minute and rest. He knew that if he did that he might not get up again.There were no shouts or sounds of pursuit behind him and when he finally paused to risk a look behind, with his chest heaving, nothing seemed to have changed at the waterfront. Cars and people were still moving slowly to and from the barges, and as far as he could tell, only the two children had paid him any attention, and they were now heading for the shop next to the jetty, presumably to spend their windfall.
Harper turned and rounded the shoulder of the hill. One hurdle had now been safely negotiated but an even more difficult one lay ahead, because although he was now safely across the lake, he was still on Bolivian territory and he could not afford to relax, nor begin to feel safe until he was well across the Peruvian frontier. At its closest point, that still lay twenty miles away.
As he moved on, he kept following the contours around the hillside above Ruta Nacional 2. It had resumed its course on this side of the lake but ran close to the shore on the narrow coastal plain. The wind off the lake coupled with the body heat he was generating from his exertions was helping to dry Harper’s clothes a little but it was still an hour after he had emerged from the water before he began to feel anything like warm again. He kept forcing himself on, trudging towards the border, trying to ignore his gnawing hunger and the fatigue that dragged at him like a lead weight around his neck.
CHAPTER 23
By mid-afternoon Harper was in sight of the Bolivian frontier post at the village of Kasani, the last obstacle before he could reach Peru. Still on the high ground above the road, he worked his way forward until he reached a point overlooking the village and the border post. There was a cluster of buildings around the border post and a mission-style church with adobe walls and half a dozen stepped concrete benches in front of it, all individually numbered as if to accommodate ticket-holders enjoying the show as people queued to cross the border. A few yards beyond the church was a thin stone arch arcing right over the top of the road that must have been used to mark the actual frontier at some time in the past. To either side of the border post he could see a very new-looking chain-link fence complete with CCTV cameras mounted on poles roughly every couple of hundred metres. Whether they worked or not was another question, and in any case, to Harper’s relief, although the line of CCTV cameras marched right down to the shore of the lake, it did not appear to extend far up the hill on the inland side of the border post.
There were no lounging sicarios nor white Landcruisers parked near the border post, but he knew only too well that it did not mean that the frontier was not being watched. The cartels had people everywhere, not just corrupt police and customs officers in their pay, but mules, look-outs, runners and kids eager to make an impression and be recruited into the cartel’s army. A sighting of any suspicious individual, whether a potential DEA man, a spy, a sicario working for a rival drug lord, or a man on the cartel’s most wanted list, would earn them a reward. So Harper would not be passing through the border post and was merely observing it to work out when, where and how would be the best means to get across.
As he was watching, he saw one of the border officials emerge from the post just long enough to push back the queue of people waiting to have their papers and passports checked before crossing the frontier. The official then went back inside and slammed the door shut, while those outside could only settle down to wait. Harper figured it must be siesta time, which meant it was the perfect time to
cross
He began to climb further up the hillside, until he was out of sight of the last of the scattered houses in Kasani and then he turned back towards the border. He crept forward. As he approached the fence he was well up on the hillside and safely out of line of sight from the border post. To his relief, he saw that the fence was not electrified, but it was still an unexpectedly formidable barrier, a steel chainlink fence showing no signs of rust or wear, and capped with a triple strand of razor wire. Keeping low to the ground and still using every scrap of cover, he began tracking the line of the fence up the steep slope, scouring the ground with his gaze, looking for any faint traces of animal tracks. He knew there were viscacha - rodents like rabbits with long tails - and the maned wolves that preyed on them, in this area, so all he had to do was find their tracks. After a couple of false alarms - tracks that appeared to be running towards the border fence but which then either veered away from it again or just ran parallel to it, Harper found what he was seeking. It was another track that was just visible as a slightly fainter line across the yellowing mountain grasses over which it ran. Harper began to track its course over the hillside. He followed it to the fence and smiled as he saw it continuing beyond the fence on the other side. Where it crossed the fence line, there was a shallow depression in the dust and he could see a small tuft of viscacha fur caught on the lowest strand of the wire.
Harper cast a swift glance up and down the fence, making sure there was no one in sight, and then stretched himself out flat on the ground and began to belly crawl his way forward under the fence. He had to turn his head sideways to squeeze through the gap and could feel the bottom wire strand scraping along his spine. He was still not quite halfway under the fence when he became stuck fast, held by the wire that had now become trapped in the back of his jacket. He reached behind him, trying to free it, but in the end he had to wriggle his way backwards from under the fence to free it.
He took off his jacket, knelt at the foot of the fence and began clawing at the dusty, gritty soil with his fingers, scraping some of it away to deepen the shallow depression slightly before trying again. Pushing his jacket in front of him, he slithered back under the fence and this time he felt the wire snag for a moment on his shirt but then slip down his back and he was able to wriggle out on the other side of the fence. He reached back under it, brushing the dirt and grit back into the depression and smoothing away the marks that showed someone had crawled through. When he had finished, he cautiously got to his feet, still sweeping the hillside around him with his gaze to make sure he hadn’t been observed.
He was now past the Bolivian border but not yet safely in Peru, for there was still a short stretch of no man’s land to cross before reaching the frontier on the Peruvian side. He advanced with extreme caution, and went to ground as soon as he saw the Peruvian border post ahead, heralded by a sign reading Puesto de Control - checkpoint. He inched forward again until he could observe the post, where a handful of people were waiting to pass through from the Bolivian side.
Harper could also see another, longer line of tourists, most of them backpackers, waiting on the far side of the border to cross into Bolivia. However, the local bureaucracy evidently required them to fill in a form at the border post, then take it to be photocopied at a print shop that, conveniently, had been set up next to the post. They then had to return with the copy of the form and their passport so they could be stamped at the border post, before the traveller could proceed. Harper had endured such bureaucratic rituals at scores of borders over the years, and knew that each step in the process was mainly designed to provide an additional opportunity for locals to extract a little more cash from wealthy tourists before they crossed the border and became someone else’s opportunity.
He could also see that money-changers had set up on either side of the border, some squatting cross-legged in the dust with an open suitcase full of cash, ready to convert crumpled Peruvian Soles notes into Bolivianos or vice versa. Others, slightly better equipped, had seated themselves at a small table and wooden chair that had been set up in the open at the side of the road. Three-wheeler moto-taxis were parked next to the money-changers on the Peruvian side, at a point where the road widened slightly, also waiting for trade from those crossing from Bolivia.
There was no sign of any sicarios or police at the border and he could simply have dropped down to the road and joined the line of people queueing to pass through the border post, but there was some risk in doing that. His description could have been passed to the officials, with the promise of a reward if he was held until the sicarios could get there, and he had not come so far and risked so much just to become complacent and be trapped at the final hurdle.
He decided to keep to the high ground and work his way along the steep hillside until he was level with the border post. To his relief there was no sign of another fence of any sort, just sparse grassland, studded with rocks. He passed well above two isolated farms clinging to the hillside, and then scrambled down a steep, terraced slope into a dry stream bed. According to his map, the stream marked the line of the border, but unwilling to take the least chance, as he moved on, he kept in cover high on the hillside and still skirted any farms or buildings he saw until he was well beyond the frontier.
Even though he was now safe on the Peruvian side of the border, Harper knew that he could not afford to lower his guard completely. Cartels, narcos and sicarios were not exactly unknown in Peru either - with Bolivia and Colombia, it was one of the three countries that grew 98 percent of the world’s coca leaves between them. Neither the Peruvian cocaine cartels nor the Bolivian, Colombian, Mexican and Brazilian cartels with which they often formed shifting alliances, paid scant attention to national boundaries in pursuit either of narco-dollars or their enemies.
He was still no more than a mile beyond the border and was still alert and very watchful, continuing to steer well clear of the main road from Bolivia. Harper was now confident enough to begin making his way down from the mountainside. As he approached the small Peruvian town of Yunguyo, straddling the narrow neck of the peninsula, he began to work his way through the backstreets of the town. By now his hunger pangs had become almost unendurable and he knew he must have cut a weird and suspicious-looking figure. He was wild-eyed, unwashed and unkempt, with a five-day growth of beard and he was wearing clothes that were crumpled, torn and covered in dirt and dust, most recently from where he had wriggled under the border fence. Despite his appearance, he felt secure enough, and certainly hungry enough, to enter the town. He needed food and was confident that the risk involved in obtaining it was manageable. He continued on his cautious way towards the centre of the town, drawing curious looks from the few people he passed, all of whom appeared to be townsfolk just going about their daily business and none seemed to pose any immediate threat to him.
Yunguyo was a drab, functional small town and even the sprawling town square in the heart of it contained no fountains or monuments, just a concrete-surfaced space, the size of two football pitches laid side by side. None of the market stalls in the middle of the square nor the shops around the edge seemed to be doing much trade. Staying close to the edge of the square, Harper circled the whole of it once, keeping a wary eye out not only for sicarios but also for any Peruvian police or soldiers. Satisfied, he walked into the middle of the square and bought some empanadas from one of the stalls. He wolfed down two of them at once, standing next to the stall, but could eat no more for the moment because after days of starvation, his stomach had shrunk to the size of a clenched fist. However, while he was there, he bought another half dozen empanadas and took them with him in a paper bag, ready for when his appetite returned a little more.
He next walked to a farmacia on the edge of the square and bought some soap, a disposable razor and a toothbrush, before heading for the small single-storey building he had noticed at the far corner of the square with a crudely lettered sign reading ‘Baño Público’ - public toilet - painted on the wall above the entr
ance. He was planning to wash and shave there but as he walked through the doorway, parting a dense cloud of flies as he did so, a hideous stench filled his nostrils. The room was empty but for the filthiest sink he had ever seen, and a dark hole in one corner from which the stench was issuing. Harper held his breath and turned on his heel.
He walked back along the edge of the square and chose a street leading away from it at random. At the far end, looking out over the lake, was a building with a domed red roof, that sprawled over a whole block and towered above its low-rise neighbours. It turned out to be a sports centre. It seemed little used and had been constructed on far too grand a scale for a small town like Yunguyo, perhaps having been built mainly to satisfy the ego of some over-ambitious local politician, or by a drug lord using some of his narco dollars to ensure local support by spreading a little largesse around the town. Whatever the reason, Harper was not going to complain about it, since when he went inside, in return for the equivalent of two US dollars, a stolid looking Aymara or Quechua woman issued him with a threadbare but clean towel and pointed the way to the mens’ changing rooms. There he was able to use a shower that, if not hot, was at least warm, wash and comb his hair, and shave at a newly-installed sink. While he could not wash his clothes, he was at least able to shake the dust out of them and then sponge them down with a damp cloth to remove some of the worst of the dirt. Before leaving, he gave himself a critical once over in the mirror. If not exactly looking like the typical Western tourist, he was at least clean and presentable enough now to pass a casual inspection.
CHAPTER 24
Harper retraced his steps to the town centre. The stallholders had now packed up and gone home for the day, but one of the gaudily painted and decorated local buses was parked in the centre of the square. In Bolivia the bus would have been called a flota but here in Peru, as in many other parts of South America, it was known as a colectivo, one of the numerous small buses that followed a regular route but stopped wherever anyone wanted to get on or off, and even made small detours from its official route in return for the driver’s palm being crossed with a couple of Peruvian Soles. The driver of this one was sitting in the sun, with his back against the bus at the side of the door, and chewing on a coca leaf.
Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller Page 23
