The Devil to Pay

by Harold Robbins

  “And that’s why you’re carrying a satellite phone? You can get the tracking information?”

  “I get the tracking information by calling the friend I told you about. She gets it from the satellite tracking it.”

  “The container’s been tracked to Puerto Nariño?”

  “It’s been tracked to Lago Tarapoto, the big lake near the settlement. The exact location is about fifteen miles from Nariño.”

  “That would be heavy jungle. How detailed is the tracking?”

  “It pins the location down closer to yards than miles. The plant is a few hundred feet from the lake, far enough in so it can’t be seen from a boat going along the lake, but close enough so supplies brought in by river don’t have to be hauled far.”

  “So when will the army and police hit the place to rescue Nash?”

  “I told you before, they’re not going to rescue Nash. We are.”

  “But if they know where—”

  Josh shook his head. “The Colombian police and army have an almost one hundred percent track record of getting hostages killed. These jungle factories are multimillion-dollar concerns; the cartels have spies out. They’ll know a raid’s coming down before the choppers lift off. Even if they don’t get advance word, standing orders are to drop everything and flee into the jungle. They kill witnesses on their way out the door.”

  “How are we going to take on so many? There must be dozens of men at the plant.”

  These were questions Cesar should have asked yesterday, Josh thought. Apparently he was getting nervous coming face-to-face with the reality of shooting it out with cartel gunmen.

  “There are, but they don’t typically keep hostages at the plant. They hold them far enough away so they’re not seen by workers and so no one gets sympathetic and tries to help a hostage escape. I’ve been told there are a couple huts about a mile from the plant itself. Satellite photos show little activity at the huts, no foot traffic going back and forth. Those huts are our target. If Nash is at the plant, she’ll be in one of them.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if’? You said they tracked her there.”

  “I said they tracked the plane there. Sometimes they throw passengers out over the jungle.”

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

  The boat captain took a break for a cigarette, a beer, and small talk. Josh was reasonably certain that the captain hadn’t bought his story about scouting out adventure tours. He had spiced up the story by asking questions about the smuggling that goes along the river from Peru into Colombia, letting the captain know that he was interested in pre-Colombian artifacts. The idea of sneaking antiquities out of Peru and to Europe or the States via Leticia worked much better with the riverboat captain than the tour story.

  “There are few government gunboats on the river, not Peruvian or Colombian. Downriver, the Brazilians have more.” He described how and who had to be paid to make sure a boat carrying contraband wasn’t stopped and searched.

  Smuggling wasn’t considered criminal by the captain, any more than Americans who fudge a bit on their income tax “expenses” thought of it as committing a crime. It was just a way of life.

  53

  Josh and Cesar spent the night sleeping under mosquito netting on hammocks after a dinner of chicken and rice and warm beer. The little “hotel” at Puerto Nariño had three rooms—and no competition to rent them. The floors were woven mats rather than wood. There was no running water in the rooms. Two outhouses were posted in the backyard. Bottled water was sold in the lobby—which was also the living room of the owner’s house—but after seeing gunk gathered on the bottom of the bottles, Josh decided to stay with beer and their own supply of water.

  The beer was good to replenish body fluids and rinse out the mouth. The wonderful thing about beer in third-world countries, where bad milk could kill you and bad water makes you wish you were dead, was that it was almost universally safe to drink.

  Since the rooms were hot and stuffy, they retreated to hammocks with mosquito netting hanging outside. Small black monkeys with light-colored faces hopped around and leered at and heckled them. A black spider the size of a large hand scurried on the ground by them. Cesar threw a beer bottle at it—he missed and only raised the excitement level of the monkeys.

  Josh had used the same cover story that had been their calling card since flying into the Amazon Basin: They were scouting out sites for adventure tours for Canadians and Australians with money and courage.

  He got the same dull-eyed stare from the hotel man that he got from the riverboat captain. Neither man believed the story, but neither cared.

  Josh guessed that either or both men would report their presence on the river to a cartel representative, probably with something akin to CB radio. He decided that Cesar was probably an asset in that regard. He was going to pieces emotionally, drinking too much, showing too much temper, the closer they were getting. It wasn’t the sort of behavior that one would expect from drug enforcement cops or high-profile drug traffickers who might plan to poach on the cartel’s jungle enterprises. Josh hoped the report sent to the narcos would not tag them as cops or competitors.

  The fact that they were not heavily armed and didn’t appear to have communications equipment also took them out of the serious threat category. With a little luck, and some laziness on the part of the cartel’s watchers, they might get close enough to find Nash before they were tracked down and neutralized. And a bit of laziness was to be expected in a place where it was oppressively hot almost all of the time.

  The next morning they rented a small canoe called a peque-peque to haul behind the flat-bottom boat. Josh had to leave a deposit big enough to pay for the canoe when he told the owner that he didn’t want a guide along.

  They bought blankets and enough provisions for a three-day trip upriver.

  When they got the outboard going on the larger boat, they cast off and headed upriver. It would take an hour or two to find the place where an opening led into a lake, or bay, formed by river water. When the small global positioning device Josh was carrying told them they were close to where Nash was held, they would stop the motor of the flat-bottom boat. The dugout would not only be quieter; it would get them in closer.

  The Nariño settlement was at the junction where the mouth of the Rio Loretoyaca, an inlet to the vast Rio Amazonas, and a leg of Lago Tarapoto all came together. As they motored up the river, the scenery was no different from what they’d seen for hours on the large riverboat that brought them to Puerto Nariño—trees, trees, and more trees, some with their trunks in water, all of which at some time of the year would be in water. Occasionally they saw a single house or wood huts with thatched roofs. A few more permanent ones had tin roofs. There was an occasional clearing where corn grew or a few scrawny cattle grazed.

  They passed a “cattle pen” flowing downstream, a flat barge made of hardwood logs and a railing. Another railing went down the middle of the square barge, creating two pens. Palm thatch protected the cattle from the hot sun.

  In one area, they saw rubber trees leaking latex from old and new cuts. Someone would make a few dollars gathering the latex and molding it over a fire into a ball that could be sold to a rubber merchant in Leticia. Today’s rubber baron was a man who dealt in buckets of latex, not shiploads.

  Once they passed a small boat carrying a fisherman, exchanging waves and shouted greetings.

  The vastness and desolation was almost unimaginable to Josh. It was the most isolated place he could remember experiencing. For hundreds of miles there was nothing but rain forest—trees, trees, and more trees, although at times the vines and brush camouflaged the trunks.

  The strangest creatures in the waters of the vast waterways were dolphins, river mammals that were related to whales. Unlike the more familiar-looking bottle-nosed dolphins of Flipper and his pals at Sea World and in movies, these dolphins had long beaks and rounded foreheads.

  The males, who were bigger, grew up to be eight feet long and
weighed 350 pounds, Cesar said. Information he remembered from his school days, when he had to learn about the flora and fauna of his country.

  The creatures ranged in color from dark gray to bright pink. The pink ones were unusual, more like big wrinkled sturgeons. He’d heard that the dolphins used a sonarlike system to navigate, not needing eyes because the water of the river was so dark and muddy, but he didn’t know if that was true.

  The captain had told them that the eyes of the dolphins were considered an aphrodisiac by the indigenous peoples, that if the eye was dried, grated, and sprinkled into a woman’s food, it would put her into a sexual frenzy. He swore to the tale as gospel, but it smacked of urban legend to Josh.

  “I remember a dolphin story told to me when I was a child,” Cesar said. “It’s a tale like the Sirens that sang songs and lured men to their destruction, and Lorelei, the bitch who lured fishermen onto the rocks of the Rhine. I was told the pink dolphins transform into beautiful women and lure men to their dwellings at the bottom of the river.”

  The long-snouted creatures were definitely strange, Josh thought. They made eerie sounds when they broke the surface to breathe, blowing steamy air from their blowholes before going back under. According to the captain, the pink ones were incredibly dexterous, bending and turning like they were made of rubber as they swam through the sometimes flora-crowded waters.

  Talking about the dolphins seemed to lighten Cesar up a little. When a big dragonfly landed on the boat, he said, “Some people call them snake doctors, because they think that they nurse sick snakes back to health.”

  Josh knew a different version. “The story my grandmother told me was that they are the devil’s darning needles, that they sew up the ears, eyes, and mouth of a sleeping child who’s been bad.”

  When they had passed a water channel that flowed away from the river and into the dense, primordial world of Amazon jungle, the captain told them, “The river people believe that canals are made at night by a giant water snake. It’s so big, it can swallow a large canoe of people with one gulp. That’s why you never see them on the river at night; they’re afraid of the snake.”

  The river was alive with plants, not just on the shoreline but formed into islands that sometimes floated downstream or appeared to take root in a particular spot until stormy high water broke them loose.

  When they reached the lake, Josh took a battery-operated GPS and used it to compare their position to the satellite coordinates supplied by the transmitter in the ether container.

  Twenty minutes later, they beached the boat along the riverbank, hidden by bushes, and started trekking across the damp floor of the rain forest.

  54

  I stared up at the ceiling. Bare logs held up palm thatch. A spider sat in a web between log rafters. A big and hairy thing, it was the size of a fist. I was sure the spider was staring back at me, blinking its large round eyes.

  Even though spiders scared me, I tried not to kill them. When I was small, a friend had pushed me into a large spiderweb. I panicked and clawed at the webbing. After that, I always had a fear of spiders. My mother told me that killing a spider inside a house was bad luck, so I would always grab a glass and piece of paper and trap the spiders to release them outside.

  The thought of trapping the spider in the rafters was not urgent to me. Some time ago, I realized I was in a hut, on a cot, alone. Opening my eyes, falling back into a deep sleep, awakening again … I don’t know how many times or how long I had been in that cycle of in-and-out. Heat, oppressive humidity, bore down on me and soon it came to me that I was no longer in coffee country. What had Ramon told me? One of the climate zones of the country was tropical jungle.

  Other than the fact I was in a thatched-roof hut somewhere that was hot and humid, I didn’t know where I was. For a while there I didn’t know who I was. Thoughts had come and gone. For a long time I thought I was nailed to the cot, because I couldn’t move. I was able to move now, had raised my arms and legs, but still had not tried sitting up. Keeping my eyelids open had been a chore that I accomplished turning my head.

  The sedatives that my neighbor in Seattle gave me had never affected me like this, but I had that same feeling of separation of mind and body that the prescription drug gave me.

  The room was empty and almost unfurnished—only the cot and a rough wooden table made from raw forest wood. Little light made it into the shack—the windows didn’t have glass but were covered by crude wood shutters that let in a little light along with mosquitoes and flies.

  Moving my hands down my body, I felt bare, sweaty flesh. I was naked. I tried to sit up, but my brain exploded. I grabbed my head and pressed to keep it together. An image flashed in my mind—the man at the airport with the map, he had blown something in my face. Strong hands. I remembered that, too. It was after he’d blown something in my face that I had been grabbed.

  Josh had warned me that I could be kidnapped or murdered and I hadn’t listened. They take their victims to remote places where they won’t be found.

  Drugged. Kidnapped. Taken from the airport to a jungle. Why? Why not just kill me? They needed me for something, maybe nothing more than signing papers giving them the plantation, and then they would kill me.

  My heart beat faster. Despite an adrenaline rush, my body was stiff, slow to move. My head ached and pounded. I slowly stretched, creating a tingling sensation as blood flowed into my extremities. I became aware of pain between my legs.

  Light came in from a split in the wall, falling across my legs. Blood was on the inside of my thighs. I hurt and burned. I gasped aloud as I realized what had happened, what had been done to me when I was unconscious.

  A storm of feelings—fear, anger, disgust—gripped me.

  They had kidnapped and raped me.

  Fuckin’ bastards. Animals. Did they think it was macho? To violate an unconscious woman?

  Rage gripped me, anger fed by hate and repulsion that turned into fury. The sons of bitches.

  I sat up and got my feet onto the floor, slowly urging myself to rise but going back down as my head swirled. No! I have to keep moving. I forced myself back up again, uneasy on weak knees, but so damn angry that I wouldn’t let myself lie back down and drift into the analgesic black void again.

  My clothes were in a pile on the floor. Using the bed for support, I put on my panties and pants and slipover shirt. My bra was across the room and I left it there. I slipped on my sandals and got to my feet again.

  My footsteps made creaking noises—I treaded lightly, creeping to a shuttered window to the right of the door. The shutters were spread enough apart for me to see between them.

  I noticed a man asleep in a hammock, covered by mosquito netting, on a small veranda just outside the window. I couldn’t expressly place him, but he looked like one of the men who could have been with Pablo Escobar and Scar when they came to the plantation. I was reasonably certain he had been with the group.

  No one else was in sight, but I only had a small field of vision through the shutter. I didn’t want to risk waking the man by opening the shutters. I crept to the window on the other side of the door and peered through the openings. About a hundred feet away, a man stood fishing at a riverbank. His back was to me. As he twisted to cast out the line, I got a good look at him. Scar. That came as no surprise. The bastard had been dogging my heels since Seattle.

  He wore a gun belt and had a gun in the holster.

  The man in the hammock let out a snore that turned into a rumbling sound as he turned a little.

  I froze in place and waited for the steady rhythm of his snores to resume. He had a gun, too, a pistol in a holster hanging on a peg that supported the veranda. Little more than the butt was visible of the pistol. It looked like the butt of a revolver.

  I stared at the holstered gun, trying to recall what I had learned about guns in a self-defense course during college. The class had included two trips to a firing range, but it had hardly qualified me to use a gun, much less shoot someon
e with it. And I had to get my hands on it first.

  To grab the gun, I had to get out the door and around the hammock. The question was, once I had it in my hands, could I use it? I knew I could shoot the sons of bitches; that wasn’t even an issue. My life or theirs. If we were going to take turns dying, these two animals could go first. But my concern was whether I could handle the gun. From the look of the butt, it appeared to be a revolver, a gun with six bullets in a revolving chamber. That was the type of gun recommended by my instructor for home protection because it was idiot proof—all you did was point and pull the trigger.

  I remembered the instructor telling me that until recently revolvers had been the almost universal weapons for police because semi-automatic pistols could jam. However, as criminals used more firepower, cops went to the semi-automatics despite the jamming problems.

  Point and pull the trigger.

  Without thinking, without reasoning or planning, I burst out the door of the shack. I stumbled on the rough flooring of the veranda, knocking against the man in the hammock.

  He jerked awake with a start, yelled, and twisted, throwing himself out of the hammock.

  I grabbed at the gun in the holster—a strap held it in. I hadn’t thought about the piece of leather that kept the gun from slipping out of the holster.

  The man had flipped out of the hammock and hit the flooring. Still prone, he grabbed at my ankle, getting a hand around it. I screamed and clutched at the gun. Instead of the gun slipping out, the holster pulled off the knob of wood.

  He jerked my leg out from under me. I tipped over backward. The veranda didn’t have a railing. I flew off it, hitting the ground with a breath-snapping thump. A shock went through my body as I hit, but the ground had a soft, moist mat of grass covering it and the landing was softer than hitting hard dirt.

  I was still clutching the holstered gun as the man above got to his feet. He let out a roar as he leaped down at me feet-first.

  I twisted and rolled to the right as he hit the ground with both feet. He stumbled forward, off balance as the soft ground gave way underfoot.