The Devil to Pay

by Harold Robbins

  The pilot was getting uptight, so Josh changed the subject to the stories of the “rubber terror” in the old days. In the early 1900s the Amazonas went through another type of boom, only instead of cocaine the “cash crop” was gummy white latex.

  With the advent of the automobile and bicycles, the demand for rubber became phenomenal. The Amazon Basin region of Brazil and Colombia produced most of the rubber in the world at the time. The area was lawless and impossible to govern. Men made their own law, with “rubber barons” staking out enormous claims, often thousands of square miles, as their “rubber plantation.” They employed small armies to enforce their claims and rounded up thousands of Indians as slave laborers.

  The Atrocities was a period of black history in a country and region that already had many marks against it. The plantation owners’ thugs would come into Indian villages and rape and murder if there was any resistance. Women were captured and held in “breeding farms,” raped to provide future labor for the owners.

  It all came crashing down by an act of theft.

  Josh said, “Some guy working for Britain’s India Office smuggled out seeds for rubber trees. They used them to grow plants at the royal botanical gardens and then shipped the plants to Sri Lanka and Singapore. Now it’s the Asians who produce almost all of the rubber in the world.”

  “It’s justice, isn’t it.”

  The comment came from Cesar.

  He added, “Labor in the Amazonas is probably cheaper than in Asia. But when you enslave and work your people to death, you end up losing your seed corn.”

  50

  The Leticia airport terminal was composed of just one building. It was no cooler inside than the suffocating heat that met them as they climbed out of the plane. The difference between the comfortable humidity of the mountainous coffee country in the Medellín region and the tropical jungle of Leticia was striking—tropical heat was a sauna. Warm, sunny, humid, and most often oppressively hot, with occasional—and sometimes torrential—thunderstorms.

  Josh would have preferred to have landed on a jungle airstrip rather than at the very public airport, but it would have taken more time and planning to make the arrangements than he had to spare.

  Inside the terminal, a man wearing a beer-and-babes T-shirt and faded jeans approached them. At first Josh thought they were going to be hit up for a hotel or taxi, but the man flashed a badge.

  “Welcome to Leticia, senors. Did you have a good flight?”

  Josh knew the man could have cared less if they had crashed and burned. “Yeah, good flight,” he said.

  “Your identification, por favor.”

  The man took their IDs and carefully noted their names and other information on a well-thumbed pad.

  In the States, Josh would have asked why he was being questioned, but no one else ever accused the Colombian government of being a zealous protector of liberty.

  “What is the reason for your visit to our city?”

  “Adventure tours,” Josh said immediately. “We’re starting a Colombian company to provide tours of the Amazonas to Americans, Europeans, Canadians, and Australians.”

  Josh liked the tour angle. It gave them great freedom to ask questions. It would even be natural to ask about places the tours should avoid because they were cartel territory. Now he tensed as he wondered how the Colombian cop would react to the story. And whether Cesar had looked surprised. They hadn’t discussed a cover story.

  The man looked intently at Josh for a moment, then pursed his lips and nodded his head, grinning. “Excelente! We get Germans, Australians, and Canadians already, but few of them. Not many Americans at all, a few druggies with melted brains who come down to find cheap cocaine. Mostly the foreigners come up the river from Brazil on a boat and only stay here a night. Tourists should stay longer; we have jungles and rivers filled with monkeys, jaguars, caimans, pink dolphins, and green parrots. An animal kingdom, no? Like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, only our animals eat people.”

  He howled with laughter and Josh joined him, wishing Cesar would stop looking so nervous. They had started to move around the man when he put his arm out to block them.

  “Something for the policemen’s fund, senors.”

  Something for the “fund” meant a bribe, also known in some Latin American countries as mordida, “the bite.”

  Less twenty dollars, Josh and Cesar left the terminal.

  Cesar said, “I’m glad he was with the police and not a lookout the cartels hired to keep track of visitors.”

  “You’ve forgotten you’re still in Colombia. He probably works for the police and the cartels.”

  51

  As a rusty, battered VW van hauled them along mostly dirt roads into and through town, Josh thought, Dodge City, Tombstone, Abilene—none of the gold-and-cattle boomtowns of the American Wild West had anything over Leticia for having a rough, frontier-outpost look.

  One big difference between the jungle outpost and the Wild West, besides the climate, was that instead of women wearing bonnets and bustles, some of them wore camouflage-colored battle fatigues and had butch haircuts—trademarks of one paramilitary revolutionary group or another. Others had a more feminine look—the kind that meant sex for sale.

  Josh told the driver to take them around town first so he could get his bearings. There were supposed to be about fifteen thousand souls in the town, but from the looks of the place, the census taker was counting a lot of people who had already given up the ghost and taken up residence at the cemetery.

  None of the men Josh saw on the streets carried guns openly, but they let the gun butts show or had telltale bulges under their clothes. A notch up from just packing heat, they looked tough enough to use it.

  The paramilitary and drug cartel types reminded Josh of something a dog trainer had once told him about guard dogs: Guard dog trainers look for big dogs that are instinctively territorial wherever they’re at. Josh decided that must be what cocaine barons and jungle fighters looked for in their soldiers.

  Most appeared mean-streets tough, even the women, junkyard Rottweilers and pit bull mixes that had been alternately kicked and thrown a piece of meat until they’d bite anyone that came near except the one that fed them.

  But the real truth about the members of the various revolutionary groups was that they almost always came from desperately poor backgrounds and not all of them had left their families and joined voluntarily. Some had been “inducted” by fear or force and grown used to the life of a soldier, with no other life to go back to. Some had joined after family or friends were brutally murdered by the side they now opposed.

  Josh also noted there wasn’t much in the way of wheeled vehicles in the town, not like you’d expect for a place with thousands of people. He saw some “vintage” VWs, battered pickups, mopeds, scooters, and many bikes.

  Other than cantinas, glorified bars that passed for “casinos,” and whorehouses, most of the town didn’t look flush from cocaine trafficking, but drug money usually didn’t filter down much to the locals. Houses were mostly wood, some brick, most with tin roofs, a few with tile, some with a coat of cream-covered paint or stucco-looking stuff, not unlike the creamy color of some sidewalks and walls.

  Some businesses were in buildings, but most of the vendors were at the numerous stalls in the marketplaces where fish, vegetables, and odds and ends passed hands.

  Though it was still early on a hot afternoon as they drove by, Josh could see that the bars, bordellos, and “casinos” were already doing a thriving business. The gambling joints were small and appeared dingy. For sure, they wouldn’t scare Las Vegas or Monte Carlo with competition.

  As Josh and Cesar went by visual advertising that had all its sins covered—booze, whores, and cards—Cesar told the driver to stop.

  “Let me out,” Cesar said. “I need to do some reconnoitering.”

  Josh was glad to get rid of him. He didn’t dislike Cesar. He actually liked him, even felt sorry for him. Having had a problem living u
p to his own father’s expectations, Josh tended to blame Cesar’s father for Cesar’s attitude about the plantation. But Cesar wasn’t good when there was a crisis. He was too emotional, drawn between having the macho courage expected of him and the reality in Colombia where a guy’s machismo comes from the barrel of a gun.

  Josh knew Cesar’s “reconnoitering” would be limited to matters of the flesh. He had his own scouting to do.

  * * *

  ENTERING THE BAR, Cesar paused to enjoy the coolness and let his eyes adjust to the dark interior.

  Two young women at the bar, Brazilian girls with toasted complexions, low-cut blouses, and short-shorts that let everything but modesty hang out, eyed him. Both girls were at an age when they should be finishing school and thinking about marriage, but neither probably had been in a classroom in four years.

  The girls gave each other a knowing look. He smelled like money.

  They took turns, an “up” system with johns, and the girl who was up approached him.

  “Will you buy me a drink, senor?”

  Her Spanish was heavily accented with Portuguese. In Brazil, the enormous country next door, the town of Tabatinga was literally joined at the hip with Leticia, which was across its border—and the border was just down the street.

  Brazilian women were considered the most beautiful, or maybe they were just the most available, but it was these girls who came from Tabatinga on their bikes and mopeds that were the whores of the town.

  “Tell your friend I want her, too.”

  “Her, too?”

  “I’m going to fuck both of you.”

  * * *

  JOSH WENT INTO a working-class bar, ordered a beer, and retreated to a dark corner. It was the third saloon he’d been in that night. He stayed back, pretended to be preoccupied with his own problems, and listened quietly.

  Besides the usual talk of wives that nagged and fish that got away, he heard stories about jungle processing plants and locals who struck it rich one way or another dealing with the narcos.

  When he heard a whispered conversation about a “norteamericana,” he waited outside until the speaker, a mestizo, left the bar an hour later. Pretending to know him, Josh grabbed the man and hustled him into an alley.

  Shoving a gun under the man’s chin, he said, “Tell me about the norteamericana.”

  “I know nothing—”

  Josh kicked him in the nuts. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t—”

  He shot him in the knee. The sound was a dull thump instead of a sharp report because the pistol had a silencer.

  The man screamed and Josh shoved the hot barrel in his mouth.

  “Next one is in your mouth.”

  Over the next thirty seconds he got not an address but coordinates—upriver eight kilometers past Puerto Nariño, on the Colombian side—the other riverbank was Peru. At a place where three shacks were on stilts, an island formed in the middle of the river. On the right was an opening into a bay; he should head due east to three shacks in a grove of banana and rubber trees. The shacks appeared abandoned but were not. The cocaine processing plant was two kilometers, a little over a mile, north of the shacks. The airstrip was a kilometer farther north of that.

  When Josh got everything he could out of the man, he hit him with the pistol butt until the man was unconscious. Josh knew he should have killed him, that if the man came to his senses before Josh reached where Nash was held, he could warn the drug traffickers holding her. A true professional would have killed the man, but Josh wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer. Josh just hoped he gave the man enough of a concussion to keep him out or in a daze for the next twenty-four hours.

  That night, as Josh lay on a hammock cloaked by mosquito netting—having abandoned the “hotel” room as too hot and claustrophobic—he listened to the sounds of the night in Leticia. Gunshots—probably just someone celebrating something by firing wildly into the air—and the folk sound of corridos prohibos, “forbidden” rhythms, competed with each other. The country ballad–type music was about the narco or guerrilla life. A guitarist was playing a tribute to Pablo Escobar, El Beneficiador, the man who sold white dreams to rich Americans and built housing and parks for the poor.

  The part about killing hundreds of human beings who got in his way—not to mention the thousands of lives he ruined—was left out of the lyrics.

  Later that night, with Cesar still gone, after the bars and whorehouses closed, a different sound made its way to him … the subdued strains of a flauta, an Indian flute.

  People say that the flute sound of the Indios is a sad one, but Josh had always found it more eerie. Tonight it was uncanny, almost supernatural, as if the flutist knew why Josh was in Leticia—and what his fate would be.

  52

  Early the next morning, while Cesar was still asleep, Josh left the hotel and followed the road down to where it terminated at the port. The waterfront was already a busy place, with fishermen rowing in their catch to offer it for sale and every variety of food and fruit being offered by people whose “store” was a tarp on the ground.

  Josh asked around until he found a boat carrying cargo to Puerto Nariño, the Indian settlement upriver. He booked passage for himself and Cesar with the captain of the two-man crew.

  Next, Josh bought a small flat-bottom boat with an outboard motor mounted at the stern to be hauled behind the riverboat. Using the outboard to get to the Indian settlement would have taken too long, turning a half-day trip into a couple days of fighting the current.

  He was loading the small boat with water and supplies when Cesar arrived.

  Cesar had a hangover and bad temper. He had awoken to find a message pinned to his shirt asking him to meet Josh at the dock.

  Josh indicated the riverboat being loaded with cargo. “It’s carrying supplies to Puerto Nariño, about sixty miles up the river. It’ll pull our boat behind it.”

  “Your little boat doesn’t look like much of an armada to attack a cartel camp with.”

  “It’s just to get us there. We have to attack the camp with our bare hands.”

  He wasn’t in any mood to pacify Cesar. Josh was once again wondering if he should leave him behind. Cesar vacillated too much for him, sometimes talking tough, sometimes running scared, all the time a victim of emotions that pulled him this way and that way. Josh wasn’t sure whether Cesar would be up to a hit-kill-and-run plan when the time came.

  The cargo boat they boarded looked like a river mate of the African Queen, little more than a dry-rotted, unpainted barge with a small railing and a pointed bow. Cargo stacked on the deck—cans of kerosene and crates of canned goods—was tied down with rough hemp lines.

  The boat was slow, chugging along, groaning arthritically as it fought the current.

  Out of earshot of the two-man crew, Cesar asked, “Why did you choose this boat? We could have hired something faster and gotten there in half the time.”

  “This boat goes up and down the river every day; no one notices it. It’s not the sort of thing drug runners or drug enforcement agents would ride in.”

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Josh considered throwing him overboard. Instead he took a swig of beer before he answered. “We’re rescuing your sister, remember?”

  “How do you know where they have her? Has someone told you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Escobar’s thugs.”

  “You’re not making sense; why would they tell you?”

  “They don’t know they told me. All right, relax, I’ll give you an education in drug trafficking. You know that the best coca is grown in Peru and Bolivia, about the same altitudes that Colombians grown coffee. The coca plants are grown best at several thousand feet on the east side of the Andes, nourished by warm, wet air rising from the Amazon rain forest. The coca farmers haul the leaves to a central location where they’re turned into coca paste.”

  “I know; they put them in barrels a
nd fill the barrels with kerosene.”

  “Kerosene, sulfuric acid, some other stuff. They end up with gray gook in the bottom of the barrels. That’s the coca paste.”

  “We put that in cigarettes and smoke it.”

  “Right, freebasing, but you can’t put it up your nose, not even if it’s dried and turned into powder. That’s where cocaine barons like Escobar and the other cartel kingpins come in. They buy the paste from Bolivia and Peru, smuggle it into Colombia, and process it in jungle plants, mostly in the north near the Panamanian border and south in the Amazonas. They go where there is less heat from the police or where they can hire guerrillas for protection.”

  “I know all this; I was born in this country, remember?”

  “You know what you read in the newspapers, but I’m going to tell you something that you don’t read. In the plants, the paste gets processed again, with more kerosene and sulfuric acid, alcohol, acetone, ether, and other stuff that people wouldn’t drink or eat but don’t seem to have any problem snorting and smoking.

  “Now, here’s the critical part. In order to process the cocaine at the cartel plant, some of those chemicals have to be imported. The most important one is ether.”

  “Okay, ether, what does that have to do with finding Nash?”

  “Someone involved in the war on drugs once cleverly figured out that if you follow the chemicals, they will lead you to the plants.”

  He finally had Cesar’s attention.

  “Ether is the critical chemical because there are only a couple countries where enough of it is manufactured to supply the cartels’ needs. The DEA has been putting tracking devices in barrels of the stuff, a radio signal that is picked up by satellites. That plane that took off from Medellín didn’t just have Nash in it; it had containers of ether to deliver to a plant down here. And one of the containers has a tracking device in it.”