by Aaron Elkins
What was more, coca was the region’s most sensible crop in terms of conservation and ecology, two subjects to which the professor was so commendably devoted, and to which Arriaga himself was deeply committed. Tea, coffee, palm oil trees — these took years to begin producing, and rivers of sweat. Coca shrubs would be ready for harvesting in one season. And they would thrive in poor soil, where coffee and tea crops would not without constant attention. Moreover, they would not deplete the nutrient-deprived jungle soil, as so many other crops would.
Nod, nod, nod, went Scofield, who in truth was in substantial agreement with Arriaga’s arguments but was increasingly anxious for him to get to the point.
And, with the moral and ecological justifications out of the way, here it came. For every quarter hectare of land — roughly half an acre — that Scofield could convince one of his local farmer acquaintances to convert to coca growing, he would receive a onetime honorarium of one thousand dollars. Afterward, there would be an annual payment of five hundred dollars per quarter hectare as long as reasonable production was maintained. If the farmer himself successfully undertook the conversion of the leaves to coca paste (not a simple operation) for further pay, there would be another two hundred dollars per quarter hectare per year for Scofield. Was Scofield interested?
Scofield was fascinated.
That had been nine years ago, and now, with almost no expenditure of effort, he was pulling in an extracurricular income of $55,000 a year, paid in good, green, American dollars, and tax-free at that. By the sixth year, however, he had exhausted his contacts in the Huallaga Valley. His earnings were no longer increasing. Knowledgeable now about the ins and outs of the underground coca economy, he itched to branch out on his own. Naturally, he didn’t dare to do anything that Arriaga might perceive as treading on his turf, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about other options.
His opportunity had come ten months ago, when the Peruvian government had announced the coming reinstitution of its “air-bridge denial” policy, a drug interdiction program in which military jets hunted and shot down the planes of traffickers hauling coca paste to Colombia for processing into cocaine. The program had been introduced by President Fujimori in 1992 with great success, but it had been halted a few years later because of international outrage over the botched shooting down of a missionary’s plane that resulted in the killing of an innocent American woman and her daughter. But now the outrage was forgotten, and the sleek, Russian-made Sukhoi Su-25s of the Peruvian Air Force were again aggressively scouring the skies, hunting down unauthorized airplanes. Air transport was now out of the question. The only alternatives were transport by water and by foot.
This was a staggering blow to Hector Arriaga and his kind. Tingo Maria was five hundred miles from the Colombian border, a four-hour trip in a small plane — but two difficult, risk-filled weeks on rough jungle paths for even the fastest “two-legged mule.” And at best, these runners were capable of carrying no more than fifty kilos of cocaine paste on their backs. A disaster.
On the other hand, for the Amazon River Basin itself it was a windfall. Amazon coca was inferior to that grown on the higher, drier slopes of the Huallaga Valley, and therefore brought less money and was in less demand. There were no Arriagas there, only a gaggle of small-time traffickers who paid low-end prices to their farmers. But with the skies effectively shut down, the Amazon River and its tributaries reemerged as effective means of transport to Colombia, and the coca grown within a day or two’s walk of it was about to become a far more cost-efficient commodity.
Arden Scofield realized this before the small-time traffickers did. As soon as the government announced its plans to retake the skies, he contacted a Cali cocaine manufacturer he’d met a couple of times to discuss certain mutually advantageous possibilities he had in mind relating to the transport of Peruvian coca paste to Colombia. Señor Veloso expressed his interest, and they talked figures for a while.
A highly motivated Scofield then set up a university-sponsored trip to North Loreto Province, ostensibly to talk ecology with Amazonian farmers. But it was coca growing he wanted to talk about. This time, however, he wasn’t primarily interested in converting coffee or tobacco farms to coca growing. Instead, he sought out the known coca farmers and paste producers, of whom there were many, and offered them all more or less the same proposition: if they would skim off a small amount of their paste production, say ten percent (virtually unnoticeable by their bosses, given the vagaries of jungle agriculture), he would buy it from them at exactly double the prices they were getting from the local traffickers. It was a deal few could resist, especially when it was sweetened with a promised five hundred American dollars up front, no strings attached.
He then got in touch again with Veloso, his new Cali connection, to discuss the specifics of delivery. Veloso would have nothing to do with getting the paste across the border and into Colombia. That was Scofield’s job; how did he propose to do it? Scofield, uncertain on this point, asked for the Colombian’s advice.
Veloso told him that there were two or three small coffee and tobacco warehouses on the Javaro River, a northern tributary of the Amazon, just over the Colombian border from Peru. They had been used as drug pickup points before, when river traffic had briefly become more practical during the previous air interdiction, and could well serve that purpose again. The one he had in mind — not far from the village of San José de Chiquitos — was somewhat run-down at the moment, but if Scofield could guarantee a steady supply, Veloso would have it rebuilt and made stronger by native laborers. Veloso would also arrange for them to stay on as watchmen. Now, could Scofield make such a guarantee?
His heart in his mouth, Scofield said he could.
Fine, said Veloso; they would begin work at once. But there was one more problem to be considered. Vessels approaching these warehouses were routinely stopped and inspected at the military police checkpoint at the border and would be under even more careful scrutiny now. Scofield’s best bet, Veloso suggested, was to somehow get the paste aboard an ordinary Peruvian cargo ship that had been making the run to these warehouses in the past, a ship that was already a familiar sight at the border checkpoint and that was well-equipped with the necessary permits. And most important, a ship with a captain who was known to have standing “arrangements” with customs authorities that would preclude any overzealous searches for items on which the duties had perhaps been inadvertently overlooked, and similar contraband that might be aboard.
Which was where Vargas and the Adelita came in.
FIVE
IT is an axiom among airport personnel in Iquitos that Yanquis are a cranky and irksome lot. There may or may not be something to this, but in fairness it should be pointed out that nobody arriving in Iquitos from the United States is likely to be at the top of his form when he gets there. There are no direct flights to Iquitos from anywhere in the United States. To reach it, one must fly first to Lima and then change planes for the flight to Iquitos. The problem is that while almost every incoming flight from the States to Lima arrives between eleven P.M. and midnight, nothing leaves for Iquitos or anywhere else until six-thirty in the morning. This means that already flight-weary through-passengers generally spend the night in the airport, inasmuch as the two-hour customs and immigration hassle they went through upon arriving, and the hour or so that would be consumed in getting to and from a hotel, would leave something like an hour and a half for sleeping (or trying to sleep) before being roused by a four A.M. wake-up call, amounting to something closer to torture than rest.
And when you’ve arrived in Lima by way of a round-trip, bargain-basement $599 itinerary all the way from Seattle, Washington, there are a few additional catches. John, Phil, and Gideon had boarded an American Airlines flight to Dallas at six A.M. the previous morning, from where they’d flown to Miami, and then finally on to Lima’s Aeropuerto Jorge Chávez. By the time they cleared customs in Lima they’d been in transit for twenty hours and they looked and felt it: grungy, stubble-f
aced, and weary. To make things worse, the chairs at Jorge Chávez are famous for being few in number and extraordinarily uncomfortable for sleeping.
Still, four hours later, awaiting departure for Iquitos, they were again in reasonable spirits. Phil was a world-class sleeper. Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the airport proper, he had been snoozing away in a corner of the polished floor on a $1.59 plastic air mattress purchased from a Seattle-area G.I. Joe’s for this express purpose. A fair number of other experienced old hands were already doing the same, paying no attention at all to the nighttime floor-polishers moving slowly among them.
As for John and Gideon, they were both enthusiastic trencher-men, and there was an all-night food court at the airport at which they had spent their last couple of hours. John had been joyfully surprised to find that it included a McDonald’s, a Papa John’s, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he had happily indulged himself in the kind of fats-and-sugars orgy that was strictly verboten on the Lau home table. He had proclaimed the McDonald’s cuarto del libro every bit as good as what you got at home, and the donuts an acceptable facsimile. Gideon went to the nearby Manos Morenas counter to try his first Peruvian meal and also pronounced it good: marinated chicken brochettes and salsa on a bed of chewy hominy, accompanied by thick slices of boiled potato that had been fried to crisp the surfaces. Milk shakes de chocolate from McDonald’s and picarones from Manos Morenos — wonderful-smelling, deep-fried fritters that looked like onion rings but tasted like pumpkin — satisfactorily finished off the meal for both of them.
At six o’clock the three of them proceeded to the departure lounge for their hour-and-a-half LAN Peru flight to Iquitos, refreshed and upbeat, only to find that they weren’t yet out of the woods. They were met with a burst of noise: a long, excited announcement in Spanish. Too rapid-fire for Gideon to understand, but the distressed faces and thrown-up hands of the other passengers told him that the news wasn’t good.
“What’s up?” he asked Phil. “Please, don’t tell me there’s a delay. I need a shower fast.”
“Unfortunately, yeah, that’s exactly what’s up,” Phil told them. “Un problema grande.”
Phil was something of a language prodigy. He was impressively fluent in Spanish, as indeed he was in several other languages. Gideon could generally get along in Spanish and a few other languages if the other person spoke slowly enough, but John was hopeless. His existing repertory consisted of si, no, por favor, gracias, buenos dias, and bueno, mostly gleaned from old Westerns. Currently, he was working on “Me llamo Juan.”
“What’s the problem?” John asked.
“Well…” Phil shook his head, perplexed. “I didn’t exactly understand all of it.”
“You didn’t understand it?” Gideon echoed.
“Well, I thought I understood it, but I must have gotten something wrong. Some kind of local slang or something. I thought he said… wait, let me go talk to the guy.”
Two minutes later he was back. “No, I understood it, all right. Cóndors. Vultures. There’s a mob of them circling over the Iquitos airport. It’s too dangerous to try to land.”
“Vultures!” John exclaimed. “Jesus, Phil, where are you taking us?”
“The thing is,” Phil explained, “there’s a garbage dump near the airport, and when the wind is right, the smell wafts over that way and brings the vultures. There are also some chicken and pig farms around the airport, and that draws them too. Not to worry, though,” he added cheerily. “They’re going to try to scare them off with cannon fire. Shouldn’t be too long.”
“Vultures. Cannon fire.” John rolled his eyes, appealing first to the ceiling and then to Gideon. “Can I please go home now, Doc?” Since the first day they had known each other, Gideon had been “Doc” to John, and they’d never gotten around to amending it.
“No, you cannot go home,” Gideon said severely. “You wouldn’t want Marti to find out you can perfectly well take care of yourself on your own, would you?”
With an indefinite length of time to wait, they split up. Gideon tried unsuccessfully to call Julie in Cabo San Lucas and then went looking for an Internet café, John went back to the food court to do some more grazing, and Phil went back to sleep.
There was no Internet café, but the bar, which had opened at five, had a few computers set up along one wall. No charge, but order something to eat or drink, and you could use one of them for as long as you could make your order last. Gideon got a good, fresh orange juice and a cup of weak but bitter coffee, and tapped out an e-mail to Julie.
Hi Sweetheart,
We’re all safe and sound in Lima — not too bad a trip, although we’re a little grubby by now. We’re waiting out a slight (I hope) delay on the Iquitos leg. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you the reason. It’s six A.M. here — nine in Cabo, I guess — and I just tried calling you, but you weren’t in the room. Probably at the spa getting your nodes uncrystallized. Don’t overdo it now. I really admire your nodes the way they are.
Nothing else to say, really — I just wanted an excuse to “talk” to you. I love you and I’m already missing you, and I’ll see you next week. Have a great time, honey.
XXX
Gideon
With a sigh he turned to his e-mail inbox.
IT took a couple of hours, but the artillery blasts did the job. The vultures flew away, the flight loaded up and left, and by ten A.M. — about the time the attendants were handing out welcome trays of warm, tasty ham-and-cheese sandwiches, orange juice, more bad coffee, and rum cake — the plane had left the coastal plain behind, had cleared the craggy, snowy peaks of the Andes, and was beginning its long descent to the Amazon Basin and Iquitos. Gideon pressed his face to the window.
He had flown over other jungles, in Central America and the South Pacific and Africa, but he’d never seen anything like this. For minute after minute the flat, gray-green mat stretched to the horizon in every direction, broken only by meandering loops of brown river the color of coffee with cream. What was especially strange was that the landscape looked almost the same from five thousand feet as it had from twenty-five thousand feet: like a huge green sponge, evenly pimpled and almost perfectly level, with no visible open spaces, even small ones, other than the river itself.
At five thousand feet visibility was cut off due to the misting of the windows, an ominous indicator of the heat and humidity to come. Gideon, who had long ago grown to love the cool, crisp air of the Pacific Northwest, valiantly prepared himself to suffer.
“HEY, look at this, this is cool,” John said with unintended irony as he came down the steel steps that had been rolled up to the Airbus. “It’s like being in an Indiana Jones movie.”
Gideon nodded his agreement. The Iquitos Airport consisted of two crisscrossed runways sitting in a sharp-cornered rectangle carved out of the jungle. No other planes there. No sign of a city or anything like it, and no sign of the twenty-first century, either, for that matter. Except for the jet airliner they had just left, they might have been in the 1930s. There was a long, low, one-story terminal awaiting them, and a few thatch-roofed huts around the perimeter of the field. At the very edge of the clearing, up to their bellies in weeds, were two rotting, doorless, windowless passenger planes of indeterminate age that had obviously made it to Iquitos once upon a time but hadn’t managed to make it back out.
The air was everything Gideon had dreaded, as thick and hot as soup. Before he reached the bottom of the stairs, his shirt was wet with sweat and his unshaven face was greasy. He felt like a turkey basting in the oven.
“A little hot,” he said mildly.
“You think this is hot?” Phil said. “Ho, ho, this is only the morning. Wait till the afternoon!”
THE ride into town was by means of a couple of two-passenger “motokars” — open-sided, surrey-like conveyances (including the fringe on top) perched on three-wheeled motorcycles driven at break-neck speed that forced the riders to hang on for dear life at every curve. These were the only taxis
to be found in Iquitos, and the streets were full of them, all skidding and scooting around each other (and around the occasional hapless pedestrian trying to cross a street) with a reckless élan that would have earned the admiration of a London bicycle courier.
The liveliness and bustle of the city came as a surprise. Gideon had known that it was the second largest settlement on the Amazon, with a population of over a quarter million, but all the same he’d anticipated a languid, heat-frazzled sort of place, where nobody moved very fast and everybody got out of the sun at midday. Instead, careening down Calle Próspero toward their hotel, he found a tacky, colorful, hard-working town that was anything but languid. There were block after block of surplus stores, off-brand clothing shops, luggage stores, check-cashing services, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and tobacco and liquor stores, most of them with bars on their windows but their doors wide open. Many of the merchants seemed to be out on the street arguing or chatting with passersby. If not for the absence of anything taller than three stories, he might have been on Canal Street in lower Manhattan.
Still, there was an unmistakable frontier quality to it, perhaps from the musty, jungly smell of the great river only a few blocks away, perhaps from the people themselves, an extraordinarily diverse mix of tall, blond, blue-eyed Europeans, short, black-haired, wary-eyed Indians, and absolutely every possible variant between the two. The whole scene, Gideon thought, could have come straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel.
The motokars screeched to a stop in front of a grand, multi-columned hotel, with nothing at all tacky about it, that fronted a pretty square with fountains and neat green lawns. Phil made a show of paying all their fares — a total of four nuevos soles for the four-mile ride: a little over a dollar. The drivers seemed happy with their two soles each.
