‘Sit down,’ Chirlo said in his soft, liquid voice.
Anderson did so. The two men who had brought him stood either side of the closed door, guns in hand.
‘Do you know what these are?’ Chirlo said, walking across and picking up the electrodes, letting the wires slide through his fingers as if they were a girl’s hair.
‘Yes,’ Anderson said.
Chirlo seemed to address the floor. ‘Señor Amarales has received news that men from your unit – the SAS, is that right?’ – he raised his blue eyes questioningly – ‘are planning to attack us here tomorrow night.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Anderson said.
‘I find it hard myself,’ Chirlo agreed. ‘But it doesn’t really matter one way or the other. We are going on the assumption, you and I, that it is true, and we are going to work out exactly how to go about defeating such an attack.’
Anderson struggled with himself to keep calm. ‘If I tell you to fuck off,’ he said, ‘you’re going to attach those to my balls, aren’t you?’
Chirlo nodded.
‘How will you know if I’m telling the truth?’ Anderson asked.
Chirlo looked at him for a moment. ‘That’s not really your worry, is it?’
‘It isn’t?’
‘If you tell me your friends are going to come over the hill in tanks I may find it hard to believe. Then I will fry your balls. Keep making sense and – who knows …’ He smiled. ‘Do you have children?’
‘Yes,’ Anderson said, knowing what was coming.
‘It’s as well. There are two other things you should bear in mind, gringo. One, Señor Amarales knows a lot about your methods already – he won’t be easy to fool. And two, I have no problem inflicting pain. I don’t need to and I don’t need not to. Now, before we begin …’ He gestured to one of the men, who came forward, undid Anderson’s trousers and pulled both them and his underpants down to his knees.
Chirlo gazed at Anderson’s genitals with admiration. ‘You are a lucky man,’ he said.
‘Size isn’t everything,’ Anderson murmured in English. He felt the cold metal clips fastened to his scrotal sack. A second later a shaft of agony coursed through him, forcing him to arch his back.
‘Just to show you the price of not being frank,’ Chirlo said.
Anderson was breathing fast, sweat running into his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,’ he said through gritted teeth. An inner voice was telling him: keep lucid, keep calm. Tell them as much as you can of what they could work out or find out for themselves.
‘Good. How many men do you think your people might send. Ten, twenty, forty?’
‘A squadron,’ Anderson said. ‘Sixty-four.’
‘How will they get here?’
‘By plane. They will parachute in.’
‘Where to?’
‘I couldn’t say …’ He saw Chirlo’s hand move towards the switch. ‘I couldn’t …’ he insisted quickly, starting to take in fast and shallow breaths again. One of the tricks taught at Hereford was to pretend to hyperventilate in these situations. ‘I have seen nothing of the area. If everywhere else is steep and forested they could choose to land in front of the house.’
Chirlo walked away from the switch, running both hands through his hair. ‘So how will they get away again?’ he asked.
‘There will have to be a helicopter pick-up,’ Anderson said. Even a child could work that out, he thought.
‘From where?’
‘That would depend on what they intend and how confident they are. If they don’t intend leaving anyone alive here then the pick-up could be from your helipad. If they’re just coming for me, then it could be any flat space big enough and secluded enough. Maybe somewhere down that road I could see from the verandah.’
Chirlo looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You have not told me anything I could not guess,’ he said.
‘That’s true,’ Anderson admitted, ‘but I have answered all your questions.’
The Colombian thought some more, then suddenly signalled the guard to remove the clips. Anderson tried not to look too relieved.
‘I will pass on your answers to Señor Amarales,’ Chirlo said. ‘Tomorrow there will be new questions. More precise questions.’ He opened the door, told the guards to take Anderson back to the main house, and disappeared.
Anderson walked back across the tarmac trying hard not search the forested slopes too obviously. Chirlo had not asked him the key question—would there be a patrol already keeping the estate under surveillance? If they really were coming to get him – and he still found it hard to believe – then there would be. Somewhere up on those slopes a fellow SAS soldier would be watching him at this very minute.
What would they need to know, Anderson wondered as he was led through the house and back to his room. Of course! His and Muñoz’s whereabouts. Which building, which room. Well, they should know which building by now. He would have to think of some way to let them know which room.
High in the observation tree Eddie watched Anderson being led back across the tarmac and into the main house. There was something about the way the SAS man was walking – he seemed to be dragging his feet slightly – which made Eddie uneasy. Maybe Anderson had been walking the same way half an hour earlier, and he just had not noticed it. Maybe the man was ill. Or maybe something had been done to him in the other building.
Why would they want to torture Anderson? For fun? Or because he could tell them something? What could he tell them? It seemed doubtful that Anderson knew Terry Wogan’s personal number, or that the Amarales family would want it. No, much as he disliked the thought, Eddie could only think of one thing the Amarales would want from Anderson – help in planning a defence against the Englishman’s comrades. Which meant the operation was blown.
As he considered this, Eddie saw the long-haired brother, Miguel, leave the house, almost leap into his red sports car and roar off towards the inner gate. It swung open to let him out, as did the gate in the outer fence.
Eddie noted the departure in his log. Miguel had been at the house for an hour and forty minutes. Could his arrival have had anything to do with Anderson’s trip across the yard? There was no way of knowing. Certainly, if the Amarales were now expecting an imminent attack they were not showing any urgency in preparing to meet it. Perhaps he was jumping to the wrong conclusions.
He hoped he was. If half the Colombian Army suddenly showed up down below then the operation would be called off, and they would have to slink back out of Colombia the way they had come in. Which might be a lot less risky than going in for Anderson and Muñoz, but who the hell joined the SAS for a less risky life.
Eddie shifted his cramped limbs and carefully examined the watch beneath his sleeve. Another forty minutes. He sighed and lifted the binoculars again. Having come this far, he thought, it would be a real pain in the arse not to get a crack at entering the evil coke barons’ lair.
‘He seemed as surprised by the idea as you were,’ Chirlo told Ramón, his eyes straying across the room to where Victoria was half sitting, half lying on the leather couch. She had arrived alone the previous day, but had so far made no attempt to communicate with him; or anyone else, for that matter. She had spent most of the last twenty-four hours sitting on the verandah and staring into space. At that moment she caught his eye and smiled. It was with some difficulty that he brought his mind back to the business in hand.
‘If it’s true we’ll get confirmation from someone,’ Ramón was saying. ‘In the meantime …’ His voice trailed off, and he stood there, massaging his chin between thumb and forefinger.
Chirlo waited, stealing another glance at Victoria.
‘How many men did he think?’ Ramón asked him.
‘He said sixty-four, but he would be bound to exaggerate. It doesn’t really matter, does it? – they are coming for him and Muñoz, and presumably they want them alive. We have all the cards.’
Ramón grunted. ‘That’s what the terrorists at t
he London embassy thought,’ he said. ‘I want some men on the roof,’ he added suddenly, ‘Permanently. And I’m going to call your husband,’ he said to Victoria, ‘I think it’s time he fulfilled some of his family obligations.’
‘Just don’t bring him up here unless there’s a good chance of getting him killed,’ she said coldly.
Chirlo felt a warm glow of anticipation in his heart.
‘I think this might be a good time for us to exhibit some solidarity,’ Ramón said curtly, dialling a Popayán number.
Victoria did not bother to reply.
‘Armando,’ Ramón said into the phone, ‘we may have a problem here …’
Raul Meneres wiped his brow with his handkerchief and put the results of his handiwork carefully to one side. A beer, he thought, and headed for the fridge. The cold Budweiser was on the way down his throat when the telephone rang.
It was Alfonsín, who worked in the fuel depot at the airbase, asking him if he would fancy a ride down to Balboa, in Panama, the following evening. There was a good dogfight on at the Boneyard.
Meneres wondered why Alfonsín would not be working on the special op. ‘I thought you were working tomorrow night,’ he said casually.
‘No …’
‘That idiot Corles told me there was some special op.’
‘That’s tonight … and anyway Corles should try learning to keep his mouth shut.’
‘Be like you trying to stop screwing women.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Alfonsín agreed, obviously pleased with this comment on his sexual profligacy.
‘Yeah, Balboa is good,’ Meneres said. ‘But I’ll probably see you this evening anyway … I’ve got some work to catch up on …’
He hung up and took another swig of the Bud. The sicario had told him the wrong day, he thought. He had said it was Wednesday night. Well, maybe technically it was, but five past midnight was still Tuesday night as far as anyone with any common sense was concerned. It would serve the fuckers right if he pretended he had never heard otherwise.
But then they would not pay him.
Out on the slopes the day wore slowly on. Chris stood lookout over the hide as Eddie and Wynwood slept, then took his own turn in the hide as the Dame took over at the observation post and Wynwood went to reconnoitre the north slope.
By dusk Wynwood had satisfied himself as to where he and Eddie would sit out the waiting hours, and how they would approach the compound. He started working his way back round the head of the valley to where he could get the clearest sight of the back windows of the main house.
Reaching the point where he had first put Totoro under observation, Wynwood settled back into the undergrowth just beneath the ridge. In the valley below he could see the now familiar outlines of the floodlit compound, the fleeting shadows of the guards, the empty helipad. There were now two guards on the roof. Wynwood had listened to Eddie’s suspicions and guesswork, and hoped the former were ill-founded, the latter simply wrong. These two guards were the first evidence he had been right.
Wynwood methodically scanned the inner and outer compound for corroboration. He could not find any. Perhaps the guards on the roof were just a whim. He went back to the job he had come for – looking for Anderson.
The main house was a patchwork of lit and darkened windows, but all were covered by either blinds or curtains. Wynwood took out the nightscope and started examining them one by one. The lit squares were almost blinding, the dark ones just that.
‘You beautiful bastard!’ Wynwood murmured to himself. Through the fourth window from the right, but only with the aid of the nightscope, he could make out a light flashing on and off. A message in the SAS’s favourite Morse code: N-E-R-O-O-M-N-O-R-T-H-C-O-M-E-A-N-D-G-E-T-M-E-M-U-N-O-Z-O-N …
‘I’ll buy you a pint in the Slug,’ Wynwood murmured. Feeling like a load had been lifted from his mind he resumed his return journey. In half an hour he would be back at the hide.
In the observation post Chris had watched the sun sink behind the western mountains, the light swiftly fade in the valley below. Then the switches had been pulled, flooding the compound with artificial light.
Beyond the reach of the floodlights and arc lights it was now fully dark, and darker than it would be for most of the coming night, since the crescent moon would be making its appearance in a hour or so.
He had now been perched in the tree for over three and half hours, but he was not bored. He rarely was these days. One of the great things he had learnt in the SAS, and particularly in situations like this, was to make every moment count. Every sight, sound, smell, touch and taste could be experienced, enjoyed, even relished. In the civvy world everyone was too hooked on motion, speed and cheap sensation. His old friends from school, they only seemed happy when they were either pissed out of their skulls or being entertained by something or someone. None of them could sit still for more than a moment. It was really sad.
The wind seemed to be getting up. No, it was not the wind – it was the sound of a vehicle. A heavy one. With a sinking sensation in his stomach, Chris trained his binoculars on the point where the Amarales entry road reached the valley highway. An armoured car swam into focus, and behind it another one. They rumbled in through the two pairs of gates and pulled up on either side of the parking space at the heart of the inner compound. Both were armed with M60 machine-guns. A man emerged from the main house to greet the two crews and escort them across and into one of the side buildings. He came out again almost immediately and went back into the main house. Silence reasserted itself.
Strange, Chris thought. The arrival of the armoured cars suggested real concern, but there was still no sign of any real urgency. It was as if the men in the house were expecting trouble, but only at some later date. Chris wondered if the green slime had been dabbling in misinformation.
It was two minutes to seven. His relief should arrive at any moment. He strained his ears, but could hear nothing before Eddie’s face appeared in the tree below him.
‘Problems,’ Chris said, handing him the binoculars.
Eddie looked and grunted. ‘I thought I heard something as I came over the hill,’ he said. ‘There’s not much action down there though.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Chris confirmed. ‘I’ll get back and report.’
‘You think they’ll call it off?’ Eddie asked.
‘They’d better not.’
Wynwood agreed. His euphoria at finding Anderson was somewhat dented by news of the armoured cars, but not totally diminished. ‘I think you could well be right,’ he said, when Chris offered his theory of an attack expected at a later date. ‘And we’ll soon know,’ he added, as he set up the PRC 319 for transmission.
The Ops HQ was apologetic. The patrol should have been told before of the decision to mislead the Colombian Government over the date of Operation Snowstorm.
‘Bloody typical,’ Chris muttered, when Wynwood told him. ‘But good news, I take it. They must have taken the odd reinforcement into account?’
‘It’s still on. They’ll be leaving Punta Gordas’ – he looked at his watch – ‘in twenty-seven minutes. But there’s one change to the plan. ‘They’ve borrowed a job lot of Yank helmets for the op, with state-of-the-art radio fitted. And they want us to be wearing them too, so Eddie will have to be at the LZ with you, and bring ours over to the north slope while you lead the troop down the other side.’
‘Makes sense,’ Chris observed. ‘You three being out of communication for over two hours before the balloon went up always did seem a touch on the risky side.’
‘A touch,’ Wynwood conceded. ‘Though from what we’ve seen the last couple of nights there’s not a lot going on around here between one and three in the morning.’
Captain Mike Bannister watched the second hand of his watch move its way round to the appointed moment. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said loudly, as it reached it.
The other fourteen men sitting on either side of the C-130’s swaying belly turned their faces in his direc
tion. Each of them was wearing an unzipped one-piece thermal suit over the usual jungle-camouflaged fatigues. Elasticated straps held the Passive Night Goggles (PNGs) around the communication helmets, ready for lowering over the visors when the time came.
‘Time to get rigged up,’ Bannister said.
The Hercules, which until then had resembled a hall full of thoughtful statues, became a writhing mass of activity, as the chutes, primary and reserve, were passed along the two rows. The fourteen men zipped up their thermal suits and split into seven pairs for rigging the ’chutes, checking each strap on their partner’s rig as if his life depended on it – which it did.
Blackie and Bonnie were one of the pairs. They counted off and checked each other’s connectors, rigged each other’s reserve ’chutes in front, with each man’s MP5 tucked in behind it. The bergens were then hooked underneath the back-mounted main parachutes, making each man look rather like an oversized child whose trousers had fallen down.
‘You’re done,’ Blackie told Bonnie.
‘So are you.’
Bannister started working his way down the plane, testing each and every strap with a hefty tug, and giving each man the thumbs up when he had finished with him. Once he had passed everyone fit to jump, he submitted to being rigged by one of the NCOs.
‘How long now?’ Bonnie asked.
‘Another half an hour.’
* * *
Wynwood lay just behind a slight lip in the north slope, his head masked by ground foliage. The crescent moon, now high in the sky above and behind him, cast a thin wash of light into the surrounding forest, but nothing like enough to render the PNGs redundant once the time came to move.
It was now nearly one o’clock and while one piece of Wynwood’s brain would have rather liked the reassurance of hearing a distant C-130 and catching a glimpse of far-off parachutists, the sensible side was hoping that his first news of their arrival would come from the returning Eddie. And soon.
Below him the guards went about their random pacings and the house lights were mostly out. For the first time in days the thought of Susan crossed his mind. To his surprise it did not come accompanied with the usual empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Instead he found himself remembering some of the good times they had shared together. That hurt too, but in a different way. Regret, he guessed, was the price of just about everything which could be won and lost. Anger was just denial; regret was about accepting that something was gone.
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War Page 16
