Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  A less costly armor option was bulletproof vests. Biker’s goggles in case someone breaks the windshield. Garry, having been shot at previously, was furiously taking notes. I began to wonder why I had never had a problem in Latin America. Not once. My experience was that people invite you into their homes and stuff you full of food for days at a crack.

  Graham’s perception was much the same, though he attributed his good fortune to forethought and awareness. Likely we would have little problem, but if we expected everything to run smoothly, we were literally asking for trouble. People who don’t expect to encounter obstacles encounter obstacles. It was the way of the world.

  In his job, Graham had spent a lot of time consoling victims of violent crimes. “The one thing I hear all the time is, ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening to me, I never thought it could happen to me.’ ” Garry nodded vigorously. That’s what he thought. Never heard of Shiftas before and suddenly there’s six of them firing guns at him. It had taken minutes—minutes!—before he had been able to react.

  We, Garry and I, decided against turning the truck into a tank. We’d take bulletproof vests and goggles. Graham said that we should conduct some ambush drills and have several options in mind in case of ambush. He thought it most likely that an ambush would occur at night. The first option was the back up and drive away. Simply stop some distance from the obstruction on the road. Maybe it would be a fallen tree, or a staged accident. Examine the situation from a distance. Graham had heard of several cases in which people had stopped to render help in such circumstances. When they got out of the vehicle, they were kidnapped, robbed, beaten, killed.

  If the obstacle looked dangerous in any way, back up and drive away. In any case, check the mirrors. Is there a car following? Armed men on foot? If so, consider the second option: the drive around. With our four-wheel drive and high clearance, we could probably escape quite easily. It was unlikely that anyone would have a vehicle with the off-road performance capabilities of our truck. I had a vision of upscale cowpunks cruising over the desert, leaving the bandits in the dust. I liked that scenario. There was a certain romance to it.

  “Naturally,” Graham said, “smart bandits are not going to set up an ambush in a place that allows you to drive around. In a mountain environment, you may have a cliff on one side of the road and a rock wall on the other. In the desert there may be deep irrigation ditches lining the Pan-Am, and a jungle ambush would probably occur in thick forest.”

  So: the third option in an ambush scenario was the ram and drive through. As an illustration of what not to do, Graham told a story about Princess Anne. One day in London, years ago, her limo was blocked by a compact car. The driver of the compact, a mental patient, shot the limo driver dead when he got out to investigate. The mental patient fired five rounds into the limo. He said later that, for reasons that seemed inexplicable to all, he needed to frighten the princess. “And it turned out,” Graham said, “that the limo driver had little or no training in ambush and abduction. He should never have stopped for a compact. He could have simply pushed it out of the way.”

  That was our final ambush option and there were two methods. The first involved simply pulling up to the blocking vehicle and pushing it out of the way. That was if we felt that an abduction would take place only if we got out of the truck. The second method was more spectacular. If we felt that the ambush party was armed, if there was no way to turn and run, no way to drive around, then we could, at our discretion, floor it and crash through. “I like the heavy crash bar you have on the front,” Graham said. “Get up some speed and hit the blocking vehicle at its lightest point. Hit it where the engine isn’t.”

  Aside from ambushes, we could very well run into a riot or two. We knew there were civil disturbances every couple of weeks in Panama, not to mention a tense situation at the border of Peru and Chile, and another at the Peru-Ecuador border. What would be happening in Central America when we got there was anyone’s guess. Riots could be vexatious and Graham suggested, quite sensibly, that we flee the scene immediately. “The longer you stay as a riot develops, the less you look like an innocent bystander.”

  Graham had once found himself in just such a situation. There was a crush of people behind him and police lines were forming in front. “I just walked toward the police and they parted to let me through. It was fairly obvious that I wasn’t involved and just wanted to get out of there.”

  Most Latin American civil disturbances, Graham felt, were pretty ritualistic in nature. They generally happen in some major square, a gathering place, usually the site of past riots.

  The ritual of the riot, in Graham’s experience, went something like this:

  People gather.

  The police form lines.

  There is a period of mutual provocation.

  The police overreact and beat the hell out of everybody. Or they gas the demonstrators. Hose them down. Sometimes they fire into the crowd.

  So it was best to avoid the ritual riot square. “You see reports on television—people getting clubbed or throwing rocks at police—and you assume that the entire country is in turmoil. But usually it’s just one specific area—a square, a plaza—and three blocks away, nothing is happening.”

  Urban riots were one thing, but in rural areas the major road through the country often takes on political significance. Dissident groups sometimes halt traffic in an effort to prove that the government does not control the country. In Chile, for instance, striking labor unions sometimes throw “tire busters” on the Pan-American Highway. These were, Graham said, sharp, pointed nails twisted like children’s jacks and thrown onto the road by the handful.

  “So,” Graham said, “you should be aware of the political situation.”

  Neither Garry nor I considered ourselves political, and I had been assigned the dirty job of trying to comprehend the situation in each country. “For the past six months,” I told Maddocks, “I’ve read The Miami Herald.” The paper seemed to have the best and most comprehensive coverage of Latin America. I also read the The Times of the Americas and the Tico Times out of Costa Rica.

  Garry and I had also talked to people who drove the roads we expected to travel. In Honduras we met a truck driver who explained that leftist rebels in El Salvador often cut off the road in the southeast portion of that country. “They put announcements in the paper,” the man said. “Traffic will be interdicted between this date and that.” Interdicted means that drivers get killed. “I was driving through on a free travel day,” the guy said, “and I got stopped anyway. They said they needed my battery to make a bomb. Left me there with a completely disabled vehicle. But they apologized profusely for inconveniencing me. If it had been an interdiction day they would have killed me.”

  In addition to political danger, we could encounter drunken pedestrians or deadly drivers. “If there is an accident,” Graham said, “if somebody runs an intersection, something like that, assume all the blame immediately and ask them how much. Pay them whatever they ask and run for it. If anyone is hurt, same deal. If, God forbid, someone darts out in front of the truck, and you hit him, assess the injuries and offer big money. Maybe a thousand dollars. Do it quick and get out.”

  Garry and I passed a look that wasn’t lost on Graham. “You kill someone,” Graham said, “it’s awful. It’s tragic. But it happens. People walk in the middle of the road. They don’t look. It’s not going to be your fault and I say, run. Just run.”

  I started to voice an objection, but Graham said, “Most South American countries don’t have radio cars. They don’t set up roadblocks. The first thing you need to do is get out of the immediate vicinity. Running is the best way …”

  “It’s not that,” I said.

  “Forget about the record,” Graham said. “You want to face a murder charge in Peru?”

  “Nobody is getting hurt,” Garry said.

  “It happens,” Graham said. “No matter how careful you are, it can happen and you better be prepared.”
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  “Nobody is getting hurt,” Garry said again.

  To that end, Graham thought we should take pains to be especially alert, drive defensively. He had designed a series of exercises that could be done in a car seat, exercises to rest the eyes and to keep feeling fit. He thought fitness was important.

  “Are you taking any drugs?”

  “Stay-awake drugs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” Garry said. “We don’t need them.” When Garry and I drove the ALCAN 5000 we had discovered that each of us fell easily into a kind of bug-eyed keyed-up wakefulness. A twelve- or twenty-hour stint at the wheel wasn’t uncommon. We liked it.

  “I’m not talking about illegal drugs,” Graham said.

  I didn’t think he was. I said, “We’ll be driving for a month. Taking any kind of speed is just a bad idea. Somewhere along the line, the drug is going to catch up with us and we’ll crash.”

  “What about sleep?”

  “We’ll just pass out,” Garry said reasonably.

  Graham didn’t like it.

  “Of all the dangers you face, the most insidious will be the danger you present to yourself. Specifically, I’m thinking about lack of sleep.” Almost every time Graham goes out on an emergency—a hostage situation, a man with a gun—it turns out later that the central figure in the drama hadn’t slept in days. “You try to figure out what went wrong, where their wires crossed. Ask the family what they were doing before they blew up and almost invariably they say, ‘He was pacing all night, every night.’ They say, ‘He didn’t sleep for days.’ Or, I pick people up on the street, they’re acting crazy, they pose a danger to themselves or others. And these guys, you find out, had just gotten out of some mental institution where they had been doing fine. But they stopped taking their medication. They stopped sleeping. Every time.”

  Graham suggested that we “monitor” our “stability.”

  “I did one hundred hours at the wheel once,” Garry said.

  “All right. But just because you did it before doesn’t mean you can do it again.”

  “I’ll keep my eye on Garry,” I said.

  “Guns?”

  “No,” Garry said. “We don’t carry guns. We aren’t trained, and they could cost us days at every border.”

  Graham took us on a tour of other, more external dangers. Drug and rob, long a favorite of crooks in Southeast Asia, was becoming more prevalent. A friendly stranger offers a drink from his own flask or perhaps some food. These con men prey especially on good-hearted travelers.

  “Ah, señor, I am shamed at my poor offering. I understand why you won’t drink with me. I am a poor man and have nothing better.” Anyone who would like to think of himself or herself as an ambassador of goodwill will crumble, take a deep breath, and drink of a new friend’s humble offering.

  “No, really, it’s very good,” the would-be ambassador of goodwill hears himself saying and wonders why there is a slight interior echo. The victim wakes up six hours later, missing his cameras, backpack, possibly his clothes and nursing what feels like the worst hangover of his life.

  I told Graham that we wouldn’t be eating local food at all. “I’ve ordered fifty man days of freeze-dried food. We buy bottled water.”

  “And we’ve got milk shakes,” Garry pointed out. “We won’t be hurting for milk shakes on this trip at all.”

  Graham asked how we expected to heat the water. “One of those electric coils people use to heat tea,” I said. “There’s a kind that plugs into the cigarette lighter.”

  Graham nodded in approval, though, in point of fact, I hadn’t considered drug and rob when I bought the food. Freeze-dried meals, I thought, could be made in a moving car: turkey tetrazzini at seventy miles an hour.

  Since we wouldn’t have to worry about drug and rob, Graham suggested that we spend some time fretting about choke and rob, a more traditional technique. The bad guy comes up behind your back, throws a rope or chain over your neck, and pulls tight until you hand over your wallet. “Watch your back,” Graham said. “When you stop for diesel, watch your partner’s back.”

  In regard to the dirty diversion, Graham suggested that whenever either of us noticed something unusual, we should yell “diversion” and move to a back-to-back position. “When you yell,” Graham advised, “point at the person causing the diversion. He is usually the most presentable of the team and is not used to being fingered. This confuses pickpockets.”

  Graham didn’t think that money belts were a good idea. Pickpockets and robbers expect them. A purse worn around the neck and inside the shirt is often suggested in guidebooks. “Some people put a guitar string inside the neck loop,” Graham said. He didn’t recommend the idea. “Sometimes thieves come screaming by on motorcycles and they grab the bag, hoping to tear it off your neck, rip the fabric. Better to lose the bag than suffer a broken neck.” In Graham’s experience, Latin American crooks didn’t often look for a leg pouch, which is a pocket fastened to the calf with elastic bands. Graham himself kept his passport and larger sums of money in a leg pouch.

  If all else failed and we found ourselves in an abduction situation, Graham said we should not get out of the truck. We were much safer in the cab. We should stay together. “They will try to separate you.”

  Abduction scenarios usually happen when an official—a real officer or a imposter: uniforms are easy to come by—asks to see your passport. If this happened in a city and we were not sure whether the man was a real police officer, we were to insist on going to the nearest police station. We should not surrender the passport to a suspicious official, ever. “That’s the first step in an abduction,” Graham said. “The confrontation usually happens in public. What they want to do is get you to a place where there will be no witnesses. The first move is to get your passport. Now they have something you want. You have to follow them. It’s a situation that starts with a minor hassle and then gets worse and worse by degrees until you find things becoming very ugly very quickly. They lead you into an alley, for instance, and there’s men there with knives.”

  The last ditch defense was physical force. A fight.

  “Each situation has its own logic,” Graham said. “Think ahead. If it looks like they want your truck and need to take it somewhere, try to ride with them, inside.”

  “Even if they have guns?” Garry asked.

  “Especially if they have guns,” Graham said. “A knife is a much better weapon in an enclosed space.”

  We, Garry and I, expressed some doubt about this.

  Graham said, “Well, first of all, riding with your captors in the cab of the truck gives you more time to examine the weapons. I’ve heard of people being robbed or abducted with toy guns. You have to think. Don’t be so panicked you forget to notice whether it’s a cheap plastic replica. Look down the barrel. Does it have an obstruction like a lot of toy guns? Is it a revolver? Then you should be able to see the tips of the bullets staring at you from the cylinder. Sometimes the guns are real, but the perpetrators have no ammunition. It’s expensive and illegal for locals to buy in many places.”

  If push came to shove, there were ways to disarm assailants. You could simply grab the gun, and get the webbing between the thumb and forefinger in between the hammer and shell.

  That sounded a bit iffy to me.

  There was another way: with hands up you create a diversion, something as simple as looking to the side as if you see something. When the gunman glances in that direction, you slap-grab the gun to one side and bring the other hand up to the barrel, twisting the weapon over the top of his hand and, hopefully, breaking the assailant’s finger in the process. There was a way to continue this maneuver and disable the assailant, though Graham thought we didn’t need to know that. We weren’t going to arrest anyone. “You just want to get the gun and get out of there.”

  I knew that technique. I had practiced it years ago in a self-defense class. We used squirt guns. About every second attempt, I got a faceful of water. “Okay,” Gra
ham said, “but the guy with the squirt gun was expecting a diversion. He knew you were going to go for his weapon. In any potential situation you face on this trip, you’ll have the element of surprise going for you. And besides, it’s worth your life. You remember that Air Afrique hijacking last week? A French citizen was brought to the first-class cabin, they put a blanket over his head and shot him. That’s ludicrous. It’s so easy to disarm people at close quarters. When the French flight attendant went for the gun, he was shot but he got it. He’s still in critical condition. But he’s alive. Think about that.”

  And so, there in Garry’s backyard, on a bright summer afternoon, we practiced taking guns away from people. There I was, standing with my hands in the air like some terrified dude in a western movie. My stomach was knotting up. On the other hand, the idea of doing this, of learning these techniques, seemed romantic and macho. It was a strange combination of sensations.

  “You guys,” Graham said after a few exercises, “are really hopeless. Tim, how long did you study karate?”

  “Maybe a year.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Fifteen years, I guess.”

  “What you know is only going to get you in trouble.”

  I told Graham that I fully intended to avoid situations where I might feel obliged to kick someone in the groin.

  “Those kicks of yours,” Graham said, “are easily blocked anyway. I teach a self-defense course for women and I think that’s what you guys need to learn.”

  A comment which made me feel considerably less macho. And then, all at once, completely assured. If a woman could learn these techniques, I could probably pick them up pretty well myself. Another macho attitude, disagreeable, I suppose, but there it was.

  “The first thing I’d say about hand-to-hand combat, having seen you guys,” Graham said, “is to avoid it at all costs.”