Josh shook his head.
“A triad killer was sent to kill me as a message to Pablo to work with them and not with the gang he was dealing with. Lily diverted the guy with her naked cunt and I killed him. I puked all over him afterwards. I was so scared, I nearly wet my pants.”
He stared at Josh again. “What have they done with Nash?”
“They took her from the airport to a plane on a dirt runway about thirty miles from Medellín, one of the fields Escobar has graded to use for a pickup or delivery before he moves the rendezvous spot somewhere else. The plane headed for the Amazon.”
The vast Amazon Basin of South America covered over two million square miles. The jungle-choked world was almost uninhabited, little explored, giving it the status of one of the last frontiers of the unknown on the planet.
The Colombian region was so sparsely populated, less than seventy thousand people lived in an area the size of France. Because the jungle was so dense and impenetrable, a Stone Age culture of indigenous people, “Indians,” managed to survive in a world where scientists were sending spaceships to explore other planets.
There were no Colombian roads connecting the few small towns and settlements in the jungle region—access was by plane from Bogotá or by boat up the Amazon River from Brazil and Peru.
The region’s very remoteness and inaccessibility made it a perfect place for the drug cartels to conduct business.
Cesar shook his head. “It’s not my fault; she brought it on herself.”
Josh ignored the comment and stepped into the doorway of the hut. He picked up a carry-on bag he’d already packed. He hid the Uzi under a board and strapped a 9mm Beretta above his right ankle and a snub-nosed .38 revolver above the left ankle.
“You’re an American cop,” Cesar said, using the American slang term for a police officer. “Bandidos carry their guns in front so everyone can see them; only cops hide them. What are you? DEA? CIA?”
“It’s too complicated to explain right now. Get your mother and get out of the country. She’s at her sister’s. It’s the only way to protect her.”
“What good would that do? We’d have to come home sometime. Besides, when Escobar wants you dead, he doesn’t care where you are, he’ll send his sicarii anywhere in the world.”
“El Beneficiador may be busy taking care of his own life at the moment. The authorities know he’s in Medellín’s Los Olivos district. The combined task forces have the area surrounded. Sooner or later they’ll flush him out. He’s flaunted himself too often in Medellín.”
“He’s been trapped before. I’m not leaving. This is my home, my country, some fucking bandido isn’t going to run me out. My mother will be all right until they get Escobar or I can straighten it out with him.”
Josh boarded his Jeep.
“Where are you going?”
“Where do you think?” He started the motor.
“You’re going after her, aren’t you? They’ll kill you, too.”
“Maybe, but I’ll die like a man, not a cowardly asshole who lets thugs beat and rape his sister.”
He hit the gas and the Jeep leaped forward.
“Wait!”
Cesar grabbed onto the side of the Jeep as if he thought he could stop it himself. Josh stopped and stared at him with contempt.
“I’m going with you.”
“You’d just be a liability.”
“I can use a gun; I’m a crack shot, better than you when we practiced together.”
“It’s not just shooting—”
“You can handle the rest of it; I’ll be there when you need me. I told you, I killed a man; I’m not a virgin. Besides, you don’t have a choice, not unless you kill me. Either I come with you or I call Jorge and tell him you’re on your way.”
Josh hesitated, mulling it over. “Why do you want to go?”
“You would never understand; you Americans don’t think like us. Regardless of how I feel about Nash, she’s family. I’m not going to let those bastardos destroy my family honor. It’s all I have left and it’s already been tarnished by my stupidity.”
Josh knew he was telling the truth. Colombia was a land where the blood feud had been refined to a science. And vengeance was taken to revenge a relative even if the person wasn’t on the favorite relatives list. It was all part of the skewed honor and machismo that drove so much of the violence in the country.
Josh drove Cesar to the plantation casa so he could grab a change of clothes and his gun.
Leaving the plantation, Josh said, “The plane filed a flight plan for Bogotá, but it never went there. It started for the capital, then veered south and headed in the direction of Leticia.”
“That’s bad.”
Leticia was a small river town on the Amazon where the borders of Colombia, Brazil, and Peru meet. It was surrounded for hundreds of miles in each direction by dense jungle; no highways went there. The only way Colombians reached their southernmost outpost was by air.
Cesar’s reaction was due to the small town’s reputation. In an almost lawless country dominated by brutal drug cartels, warring leftist guerrilla armies, and right-wing paramilitary murder squads, Leticia had a Wild-Wild-West atmosphere, “Dodge City” Colombian style. Its isolated position, surrounded by impenetrable jungle where three countries met—and none seriously patrolled because it was almost impossible—made the town a natural as a crossroad for drug smuggling and gunrunning.
Coca paste, brought in from other countries, was processed into “white gold,” cocaine powder, in jungle plants by the Colombian drug cartels, while planes and riverboats brought weapons purchased in Eastern Europe to supply the warring political factions.
Cesar said, “There must be police in Leticia who can stop them, the army; she’s an American—”
“Even if they were willing to step in, which is doubtful, they wouldn’t find her. Besides, the plane won’t land in Leticia, not with her on board. The cartels have airstrips deep in the jungle. When they kidnap people, they can keep them there indefinitely without fear of discovery.”
“And bury them there. I thought we were going to go bust her out of a house somewhere around Medellín. How are we going to locate her in the damn jungle? We’ll need a small army just to find her, and gunship choppers—”
“We have to do it ourselves. No one gives a damn about a headstrong American woman who got herself into trouble. Right now everything’s focused on bringing down Escobar.”
“They won’t help at all?”
“I’ve got a contact, an old friend who feeds the operations guys information obtained from satellites, tracking devices, and reports from informers and observers. She’ll give me everything she can about the plane. But no one is going to pull planes and troops off a showdown with Escobar to scour the jungle for Nash.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I know a pilot who will fly us into Leticia. He’s expensive, but the only other choice is to go through Medellín and Bogotá, and we wouldn’t make it there until tomorrow.”
They stared at each other for a long moment.
Finally, Josh said, “It’s going to be dangerous. These people are stone killers. You can’t hesitate to shoot one of them. They’d kill you with no more thought than squashing a bug.”
“I don’t care,” Cesar said. “Remember, she’s my sister. It’s about blood. And honor.”
BLOOD AND HONOR
In Colombia, stories of family tragedies and the vengeance they spawn have a name: “culebras” (snakes). The Colombian novelist Fernando Vallejo once wrote that culebras are “outstanding debts. As you will understand, in the absence of the law that is always being rewritten, Colombia is a snake house. Here, people drag behind them feuds sealed generations ago: passed from fathers to sons, from sons to grandsons: and the brothers fall and fall.”
Sometimes it seems as if every alliance of every feud in Colombia begins with the killing or kidnapping of a family member.
—ROBIN KIRK, MORE TERR
IBLE THAN DEATH
48
The small plane carrying Nash, Jorge, one of his cohorts, the pilot, and a load of ether and other chemicals used to process cocaine touched down on a short, narrow runway scratched out of the jungle in southern Colombia. The strip was a mile from the river and less than two hundred yards from the plant where the chemicals were processed.
The region was little populated, but the cartel had no problem getting help. As soon as a processing plant was assembled, Indians who had subsisted on fishing from a dugout, a canoe made from carving out the guts of a log, suddenly found short-term employment with high pay. The employment was short-term because eventually the police, army, or other raiding drug traffickers soon brought the processing at that location to an end. But within weeks, another plant was being assembled at another location hidden by the ubiquitous jungle. The jungle was illimitable and so was the greed of the narco-traffickers.
Donkey carts met the plane to haul the chemicals. Jorge and his compañero Benito commandeered one of the donkey carts. The two of them carried Nash out of the plane.
She began mumbling incoherently and struggled as they grappled with her. Jorge put a cloth to her face that had boo on it and she quickly became docile. The workers who had come to haul the chemicals turned their heads away to avoid staring at the helpless woman.
Once they had her lying in the cart, they loaded water and supplies into it. Jorge led the donkey with Benito following behind. They didn’t follow the carts carrying the chemicals to the processing plant but veered off, heading directly to the river and then alongside it. A small path had been chopped out of the jungle to accommodate the cart.
Jorge and his partner had brought kidnap victims to the location in the past. Kidnapping ranked close to murder as a dark activity in Colombia. No place in the world compared in the number of people kidnapped, nor did any have a greater percentage of seized victims killed after the ransom was paid.
The narrow path hacked out of the foliage led to a palm-thatched-roof shack on stilts within shouting distance of the river. During high-water times in the rainy season, only a boat could reach the shack. It had belonged to an Indian family that etched a bare existence from fishing and gathering liquid rubber from the trees that grew wild in the area. They had willingly taken a thousand pesos to abandon their shack, building another one five miles downstream.
Jorge and Benito carried Nash up the platform of logs that had been tied together to create steps to the veranda in front of the one-room shack. Carrying her inside, they placed her on a wood cot with a dirty mattress.
The only other furniture in the room was a three-legged table made from local wood. The table leaned over because one of the legs was ready to fall off. Cooking was done outside.
After depositing her, the two men went back outside. Their “sleeping quarters” were mosquito-netted hammocks hanging on the veranda. Other than to get inside when it rained, there was little reason to be inside the shack.
Two dirt mounds, about a foot high, that looked like big anthills stood in back of the building. About forty feet apart, they were a tejo court, for the traditional Colombian game similar to horseshoes, but a game with a bang. In each of the mounds was a metal pipe that came up to the top. The tops of the pipes were loaded with a small amount of gunpowder charge called mecha. Most towns had tejo courts.
Players took turns throwing a smooth, round chunk of metal or stone at the loaded pipe. When it hit exactly right, the impact caused the gunpowder to go off with a bang like a big firecracker. It was a traditional man’s game—bets were placed; egos were put on the line.
In this case, the winner would have first rights with the unconscious woman in the shack.
49
The pilot of the plane Josh hired had a particular interest in Leticia. “There’s a doctor there I know, one of the few in the town, that wants to go into business with me. I fly him once in a while to Cartagena, where he picks up medical supplies.
“He wants me to fly in people for adventure tours. After I bring them down to Leticia, he’d have a small riverboat take them along the Amazon. Says there are foreigners dropping in on Leticia all the time, not just the drug crowd, but adventurous young Canadians and Australians who come down to check out the Amazon. There’s even a national park near Leticia, but it doesn’t get many visitors. Hell, there are more animals in the park than people in the entire Amazonas.”
Amazonas was the name of the vast, little-populated tropical area for which Leticia was the government center.
They all knew why the national park didn’t get many visitors—the region had a reputation for drug running and gunrunning. The two main “industries” in the jungle were smuggling items to avoid custom duties and smuggling in coca paste for processing. Growing high-grade coca plants for processing was also becoming a local business—the cartels had developed a coca plant that could be grown in the jungle and was almost as good as the plants gown in Bolivia and Peru.
“Why not tourists?” the pilot asked. “The Brazilians conduct tours. Their riverboats with tourists even come to Leticia. You have all the resources God gives us in the Amazonas. The area is larger than most countries and it’s almost uninhabited.”
From the air, the jungle was an endless green carpet that stretched forever at all views from the plane. It looked flat from the air, but Josh had read that some sun-loving trees, called emergents, grew two hundred feet high, about the height of a twenty-story building, with much of the jungle a hundred feet deep.
Not only were there few humans; there were animals, monkeys and sloths, that spent their entire lives in the trees, never touching the jungle floor, and others so deep in the foliage that they never saw sunlight.
“It’s not quite uninhabited,” Josh said. “There are plenty of bushmasters and fer-de-lance,” naming two of the world’s most poisonous snakes, “not to mention those big crocodile things you call caimans, mosquito swarms carrying fever, spiders as big as hats—”
“That’s the adventurous part,” the pilot said.
Josh said, “Why don’t you and the doctor just stick to drugs? That’s why you fly him to Cartagena, isn’t it, to pick up medicines smuggled in, so he can resell them in Leticia for a thousand percent profit?”
“We all have to make a living.” He shrugged.
Josh knew exactly how the pilot had made his living—until recently. Cesar was wrong, Josh was neither DEA, CIA, FBI, army, navy, nor Coast Guard, the U.S. government agencies operating in and around Colombia as part of the joint U.S.-Colombian war on drugs. He was a member of a multi-national group recruited from the top echelon of police and military intelligence in the world who operated independently in the country, but whose job was to point the way for the other agencies.
He had not lied to Nash when he told her he had an engineering background and had come to Colombia to work in the oil industry. But he left out the fact he had been recruited by the DEA after a close friend had been killed by drug traffickers. Josh hadn’t been inducted into the DEA proper but the splinter group that used lookouts like him who could rub shoulders with the cocaine barons but keep enough distance so as not to raise suspicions.
The pilot of the plane taking them to Leticia had also been recruited after he was caught flying chemicals into the jungle for the Medellín cartel. He no longer flew clandestine missions for the cartel, using a truthful excuse that he had police watching him, but he had eyes and ears and learned a great deal just being around the airports and drinking with other pilots. He relayed what he heard in return for avoiding a jail sentence.
“Some of these people kill for their living,” Josh said. “What do you know about the airfields around Leticia?”
Josh wasn’t asking about the airport they were bound for but the illegal runways that were scratched out of the jungle.
“Everybody knows the cartel has moved into the Amazonas, that they’re using the cover of the jungle to manufacture cocaine. It brings money into Leticia, but
there’s always the devil to pay when you make a deal with criminals.” He grinned, as one who had dealt profitably with the devil. “You’ll see American dollars used more in the town than pesos.
“Besides the ones who are spending big money, the doctor says he gets Indians in every day, mostly from around Puerto Nariño, a settlement about a hundred kilometers upriver from Leticia, their hands swollen double in size from the chemicals used in processing cocaine in the jungle factories.
“What do they get for poisoning their bodies with harsh chemicals? They are paid so little for the unhealthy work, it makes little difference in their lives. They drink more beer and buy more two-dollar whores, but they get old fast and die in agony. It’s a curse.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Josh said. “What have you heard about the airstrips?”
“There’s an airstrip near Puerto Nariño, nothing more than a clearing in the jungle, but it gets so much traffic the locals jokingly call it Nariño International Airport. Every few months, the army puts on a big show of enforcing the drug laws. They blow up an airstrip and publicize it as if they had made a major blow against the cocaine desperadoes, but these airstrips are just scratches in the jungle. You get rid of one and they hire the Indians to clear another.” He shook his head and grinned. “The doctor told me that drug trafficking is like a cancer that has metastasized. You can find it and treat it, but it always seems to pop up somewhere else.”
Josh knew the pilot was being evasive about giving information about the cartel, perhaps due to Cesar’s presence. But it was true that airstrips had short-term use.
Josh got the name of the doctor from the pilot. The doctor’s daily contact with laborers from the jungle factories would make him an invaluable source of current information. He probably heard more about the logistics and operation of the cartels’ drug manufacturing from his patients than undercover narcs heard from paid informers.
The Devil to Pay Page 26
