As we flew through the night, the plane would bank and Chagnon would turn to me and name a city that we could see on the horizon. There was Chicago, and then New York and then we banked to the south and just a few minutes later out the side windows were the lights of the Washington Monument and Capitol Hill. Then the plane hovered and Chagnon had a man untie my hands.
Come over here, Mr. Lyons. Impressive, no?
He let me look through the sights of his rifle at the White House. Silhouetted in one of the top story bays, in the cross hairs, no more than fifty yards away, was the unmistakable lanky figure of the president. Calmly he took the rifle back. Then we jumped and rolled and climbed instantly in a massive acceleration.
What's the power source? I asked, barely able to whisper.
Chagnon laughed.
Conventional chemical batteries, Mr. Lyons.
This makes the Harrier jet seem like a toy.
It is a toy compared to this. We call it the Night Horse. Caballo de la Noche. Totally indigenous engineering and fabrication. Cloak of invisibilidad. Infinitely fine focus. We have technical input of course from allied forces. The Iranians are good friends. But listen. When we have the code of the Safira this will be like nothing. The time is soon. Then we will make a small announcement and you will see the governments of the West capitulate without a fight. The banks are already in our camp. The oil companies and their military wings, the dinosaurs of the old order will dry up and adios, away with the viento. Where should we go? North? South? Have you seen Timbuktu, the legendary cities of the Crusaders? Or perhaps you prefer Machu Picchu?
I don't care, Chagnon.
You are disappointed. Do not be. All of this is also for you.
What do I have to do?
Help us.
How?
Contact your son. Explain to him that the Chocomal belongs to us. We are the inheritors that the Mayans knew about. The forces of the night, of the dog-lady Mictecacihuatl. The time of Quetzalcoatl is done and now we bring back the sacrifice.
What are you talking about?
This is how we do it. Contact your son. Bring him in. And you will ride with us.
How will I do that? You've got to let me go.
No. I do not let anyone go. We feed on your fear. If you fail, you will never see him again.
He swiveled in the seat and put on headgear. He spoke through the mouthpiece and checked a small device in his hand. Then he showed me a video he was watching, some inane game show off American television.
I like these judges. They are merciless. I think I will find them and make them cook for us.
He laughed. I wondered if he had any sanity left and whether he ever felt the weight of responsibility for anyone. I had heard from Lucas that there was a woman prisoner that he favored sometimes with personal visits. Did he take her for rides also on the Night Horse? I had to remind myself to not let my guard down. I feared that the minute I showed some humanity, some fear, my days would be numbered. I had to continue to play this game. The truth was, I was scared, more scared than I had been when it was just simple torture. This order of fear was of far greater magnitude because I could understand now what Chagnon was about, that he meant to end life, literally annihilate life, wipe it off the face of the earth.
We flew for an hour or so north and west. I could see a band of light ahead and below which must have been the sun on the edge of the horizon. Then Chagnon ordered the pilot to fly over some mountains, and we descended.
We are on the rim of the Pacific, he said. When the Resonator is complete here is where the volcanoes will explode first. But the tremors will be felt across the earth. It will mean the destruction of all the cities. Complete and guaranteed destruction. Nothing will be left.
The aircraft hovered above the mouth of a volcano. In the dim light of morning it was releasing volcanic steam. It was an awesome sight, as if the planet were breathing, and it seemed to calm Chagnon down. He put the seat back all the way and dozed. The men guarding me relaxed and the pilots turned to me and grinned in the lights of their overhead instrumentation, as we flew back the way we came into the rising sun.
Shortly afterwards, we came in for a landing, hovering, and descending onto a runway and then taxiing into an underground shelter. Chagnon awoke and had me hooded. He was angry with the soldiers for having let me observe the landing. Then I was being led down corridors and in and out of the elevators. Guajiro and Lucas were there. I recognized their voices along with a new man. When they took the hood off, we were outside the doors to my cell.
¿Cigarillo? I asked Lucas. He tapped one out of the pack and they let me smoke for a minute or two outside the cell. The new man was younger, maybe a little older than Ricky. I asked where he was from. Colombia, like Lucas. Guajiro was the only Venezuelan.
Do you guys never get lonely? What do you do for amusement? Are there female soldiers here?
Female? asked Lucas.
Women. Girls, the opposite sex. Lalala, I said mincing a couple steps. The young one, Ruben, laughed.
Come on. Come on. Time over, said Guajiro. I threw down the cigarette and stubbed it out with the standard-issue rubber sandals.
Thanks for the splendid company. It's been a pleasure. In the words of the immortal George Carlin, the forecast for tonight is dark, so don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.
I leaned on the wall. Guajiro glared at me and inclined the rifle butt slightly as I went in the door. I turned and smiled as he slammed it shut in my face.
Then I threw myself on the bed and waited for the fear to subside.
What if Chagnon stopped coming? They might just let me rot down below here. Although we were deep enough to be insulated from the weather, that didn't save me from the night shivers. I wrapped the thin blanket around me and tried to think about Ricky and Mary. That usually worked. I concentrated hard and tried to think of them feature by feature, starting with hair, and then their faces, first Mary and then Ricky, and then get a picture of them both together in my mind. That was my constant meditation, a discipline that protected me from the demons and the constant fear. But this time it failed. I felt fear continue to wash over me like lava flowing from a Pacific Rim volcano, like the night that Chagnon worshipped as a harbinger of the Santa Muerte.
Time is such an elastic measure. It's not much to hang your hat on without the memories. It just stretches and sways until there's not much else to fix your attention on. No books, music, hardly any room to move. Just the bare walls and the buzzing fluorescent light that is always on. I've been marking the paper, counting up the days or cycles marked by the delivery of food, and now I see that several weeks have gone by, and it seems that I am an old man since I have no memory of the time. This is the one weapon that Chagnon has that will beat me in the end, and he knows it. It will be my final annihilation, the loneliness and the isolation. It's worse than darkness. The fluorescent bulb shows me my own hands, useless, pitiful. Writing the days is an act of attempted salvation, but I need to keep writing in order to ward off the soul destruction that comes from doing nothing, drowning in the empty universe.
There was a shift, a wobble in the axis. One morning Lucas and Guajiro announced the new regimen with a more emphatic-than-usual arrival and door opening. They marched me down the corridors, a longer than usual hike. I stopped following at some point, and Guajiro threatened me, prodding me with the rifle butt. My handcuffed hands went up before my face instinctively.
Where are we going? I asked, collapsing to the ground.
I admit my cowardice takes the spring out of my knees. It's one thing I've learned about myself. My knees have no pride. I was convinced they were leading me to some execution chamber, sick of keeping me any longer.
Tell Chagnon I have the secret of the Safira. I'll tell everything, I cried.
Come, said Lucas. He and Guajiro lifted me by the arms and dragged me along for the last hundred yards or so. I made myself heavy and sighed and groaned like a sick anima
l. There was a door. On the other side of the door I was uncuffed and shoved in with three others in the same drab, grey pajamas I was wearing, with the thin, drawn faces of malnourished prisoners. Lucas and Guajiro clanged the door shut, and I was saved. I thanked God, the almighty, even Chagnon, for I knew I had been spared. I tried to stand.
Two men and a woman stayed where they were. I stood finally, and slowly made my way to the relatively clean and upholstered sofa against the wall. The floor was the same unpainted cement slab as my cell.
There you go, buddy, said the smaller, thinner of the two men, helping me down on the sofa.
Grey stubble covered his face, and he had a bruise on his mouth and swollen lips. The other man stood in an observant neutral pose with arms crossed. He was taller, stooped to one side as if his back were permanently crooked. The woman, straight blond hair and a scholarly look, sat still on the ground and covered her knees with a ragged, thin blanket.
Where are we? I asked.
Good question, said the tall man.
Better question: Who are we? Name is Talbert, William Talbert. That there is Raymond Hammond and she's Sabine, said the older man, sitting beside me and looking at me with a neutral expression.
Sabine DeVries, said the woman.
I couldn't help myself. I was crying, unable to speak.
Hey, hey, it's all right, said Talbert, clapping me on the shoulder.
Great. Another blubbering eejit, said the woman. I looked up and she was still clutching her knees and glaring at me with disgust.
I'm sorry, I said. I just was convinced that I was about to be offed.
Ah, you never do know, brother, said Hammond. He paced absent-mindedly, taking a circuitous route.
Are you military? asked Talbert
No.
Just a civilian, huh?
Yeah. Name is Al Lyons.
Well. Welcome to the club, Al. We're prisoners of the Santos Muertos. We're probably somewhere either along the Mexican border or northern Canada. We haven't figured out where yet.
Well, there's some kind of facility where they're building a weapon. The Resonator.
Trouble sleeping, huh? said Hammond.
That's not the worst.
Waterboarding? asked Talbert.
Not lately.
Chagnon's softening you up, said Talbert. Be careful. We can help you, but we're only allowed a couple of hours of contact a day. It is possible that he wants you around, or it might be that he is letting you in here looking for information. Either way you'll be lucky to survive another few months. We've seen people come and go.
Where do they go?
Chagnon and his men are cannibals. They are reenactors. Believe themselves to be inheritors of the Mesoamerican cult of the living sacrifice.
Are we all in solitary?
Yes.
God, I'm just so happy to have someone to talk to. I don't care. He can kill me tomorrow. It's like getting a new lease on life to have someone to talk to.
It is. We've all been there.
I never told them about the flight on the Night Horse. I kept it to myself, like a secret shard, uncertain of its use. I felt a lightness and an unreality that defied description. It was as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest and replaced with helium. There was no feeling, but the absence of pain was bigger than anything that had ever happened to me.
Lucas and Guajiro, sometimes Lucas and Ruben brought me in to the shared cell for a couple of hours every other day. It became my sanity, my release, everything, to the point that I feared what would happen if I were ever not able to go.
Talbert was a Green Beret from Nacogdoches, Texas who'd been captured in Afghanistan while infiltrating a jerga in Helmand Province. The Taliban had sold him to a Turkish smuggling ring, which in turn had handed him over for a price to the Santos Muertos. They were negotiating, apparently, via intermediaries on Wall Street, to liberate Talbert in exchange for the release of some of their men from federal incarceration. Talbert had little patience for the softer tendencies of the other two.
Hammond, the second American, was more suited to polite conversation, with an intellectual side and the default mannerisms of a country gentleman. He had studied biology before becoming a fighter pilot and claimed to be a follower of the more Zen-like teachings of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. He had been shot down in a stealth jet somewhere over the Brazilian rain forest on a test flight. For three days he had wandered in the green desert like Antoine de Saint-Exupery before being discovered by a tribe of Yanomamo, who took him in and then sold him to the Santos while he slept unaware in a hammock beside the Caquetá River. He also expected to be released in a prisoner exchange.
Sabine DeVries had worked for a church NGO in El Salvador that set up schools. She was an enigma to me. She seemed to hate Talbert and was often silent, sitting with knees rolled up to her chin. She put up with Hammond, just barely, and resented my presence without, it seemed to me, giving me a chance. She was bitter, probably because, unlike the other two, she expected to be an eventual human sacrifice in one of the Santos Muertos's ritual reenactments.
Talbert's obsession was to develop a sign language among us, and when he learned Chagnon had given me a scrapbook to write in, he asked me to smuggle in a few sheets of paper and a pen. There was a surveillance camera trained on us at all times, hung from a fairly crude plastic housing above the door I came in, so the three had developed a routine where they did exercises, jumping jacks, deep-knee bends, and pushups, led by Talbert, until Hammond, pretending to become overheated, would take off his shirt and hang it above the door on the plastic box. With sheets of paper and the pen, we would then sit against the wall while Hammond wrote out an alphabet with corresponding hand signals. We made four copies and began to commit the signs to memory so that we could communicate at all times on important matters without fear of being understood. It took a few weeks, but eventually we all became pretty good at it, practicing with banal conversation. But then, after a period of time in which I proved I was trustworthy, they let me in on their big secret. They were working on a tunnel from the ceiling ventilation shaft in our common room.
We used the handles of forks they'd stolen from their dinner trays to loosen the screws on the vent cover. I wasn't strong enough to balance on anyone and dig, but switched off with Hammond to have Talbert or Sabine on my shoulders working away at the screws to loosen the cover and reveal the work they'd been able to do thus far. Above the drop ceiling was the pliable ventilation pipe, about ten inches wide, surrounded by the layered rock we were buried beneath. The plan they had was to widen the mouth of the rock and dirt shaft in which the pipe lay. The three of them were hoping that only a few feet above the ceiling, if you followed the shaft, would be the floor of another tunnel or shaft wide enough for a person to get through.
We would only spend about fifteen minutes working before we would stop and sweep up the dirt and rocks off the floor with our hands. We buried some of it beneath the sofa in a hole that they had found under a cracked section of concrete. Then we would divide up the pile among us and Talbert would lick up the remaining stone dust with wet fingers and swallow it. We would put the rest in our pajamas, tying up sleeves and legs to carry it out that way. Once back in our cells, the idea was to dump the dirt in the latrine buckets that were washed out with hoses in the bathroom and pumped up to the septic tanks.
Lucas, Guajiro and Ruben used to argue after my weekly shower and on the way back to the cell about who were the greater fighters in the wars of liberation, Colombians or Venezuelans, who were the better lovers, or who made the best horsemen, and they tried to involve me as the adjudicator in these discussions. I was able to ease the strain among the three by reminding them that soon they would no longer be young, and the best solution for losing one's youth was to try and get along and not always feel that they had to prove themselves in these petty arguments. But of course they were suffering from isolation almost as much as we prisoners. And we had our own di
fficulties that eventually proved our undoing.
Sabine had a cheap paperback book given to her by Lucas. It was a chapbook of poems by Nicanor Parra called Los Profesores. Lucas was very secretive about it and had risked a lot to give it to her. Sabine brought the book with her to the common room to share. It was in Spanish, and Lucas had written out translations of some of the poems in English in the margins. The translations revealed a rebellious streak, a fondness for a human outlook, that I thought was a revelation:
Los profesores nos volvieron locos
a preguntas que no venían al caso
cómo se suman números complejos
hay o no hay arañas en la luna
cómo murió la familia del zar
The professors drive us crazy
with their stupid questions
how to add complete (sic) numbers
are there or no spiders on the moon
how the zar's (sic) family finally died
Savior Page 15
