Which feeling, Docherty thought, probably explained why the man was taking a chance on helping him. If the gringo proved to be a superman, then they would all benefit, and if he proved a damp squib, then the Tarahumara would be no worse off than they had been before he arrived.
It was just gone eleven when they put out the fire, checked that the horses were secure and started across the broken plateau on foot. The moon was high now, spreading its light across a vast panorama of mountains, and for the best part of an hour Docherty followed Manolo across the rocky landscape, clambering in and out of deep clefts in the rock, striding across stone slopes which time had worn as smooth as a marble floor.
They were heading down a dry stream bed towards a group of stunted trees when Manolo suddenly stopped, so that Docherty almost banged into him. Over the other man’s shoulder he had a fleeting glimpse of something slithering away into the rocks. ‘We are almost there,’ Manolo said softly, as if that were the reason he had halted, and a couple of minutes later they were looking out across the head of a deep valley. Almost directly in front of them the crenellated walls of the Ixmíala fortress monastery glowed in the moonlight.
Their view of the walled compound was from the side. On the right, nestling against the head of the valley, were two buildings, the church rising up behind the two-storey living quarters. A wide flight of steps led down from the front of both buildings to a large open space, and an arched gateway in the wall to the left disgorged a dirt track which disappeared into the darkness of the valley beyond.
Two four-wheel drives and an R44 Astro helicopter were parked on the open ground which fronted the monastery buildings; this space, Docherty remembered, was called an atrium. The stub of stone in the middle would once have supported a cross, and the broken towers at each corner of the wall were what remained of the chapels. Atriums were intended for the use of overflow services, though how the local clergy ever expected to fill a church in a place like this was beyond him.
He indicated to Manolo that he wanted to move left, for a better view of the front of the buildings. The Indian nodded, and led the way.
Docherty’s intentions were purely professional, but he couldn’t help spending a few seconds admiring the front of the church. The details of the carved door and stone columns were hidden by distance and darkness, but the gabled belfry, with its seven bells still hanging in the seven arches high above the door, possessed the sort of simply beauty which he had always loved.
Almost reluctantly he trained the SAS nightscope on the building which stood to the right of the church. There was an open chapel at the front, and the glow of light was visible through an open door in its inner wall. As he watched, several figures suddenly walked into that glow, almost eclipsing it. There were four of them, all men, all in uniform.
‘The local Federales,’ Manolo sneered.
They climbed into one of the pick-ups, which reversed before speeding off down the valley road in a moonlit cloud of dust. Docherty directed the nightscope back towards the interior of the building and kept his eye on the inner glow for several minutes. No one extinguished it by shutting doors, and soon the lights were going out on the second floor.
Manolo put words to what the Scot was thinking. ‘There would be no trouble getting in,’ he said. ‘We have sometimes thought about such an attack ourselves. But where would we run to afterwards? We have to live in this land.’
Docherty didn’t, but then getting away from it didn’t look much easier. As the two of them walked back across the plateau, reclaimed their horses and rode back down to the canyon, he went through their options. There didn’t seem many to choose from.
Shepreth and Carmen emerged from the hotel room at about nine, both wondering what had hit them. They had spent more of the night making love than sleeping, but it wasn’t just that – neither he nor she had ever been gripped by such a desperate passion. It might be wonderful – it was wonderful – but it also felt almost unreal, and that feeling was exacerbated by the receptionist’s news that there was a message from a Señor Docherty.
‘Arriving early afternoon,’ was all it said.
They had breakfast, stared at each other for a while, then went back to bed.
They came back downstairs soon after noon, and Shepreth called up Vaughan from the booth in the lobby. ‘I’m in the Nuevo Hotel in Creel,’ he warned the American. Privacy was not guaranteed on calls originating anywhere in the Sierra Tarahumara.
‘Your client also seems to be in Chihuahua,’ Vaughan told him. ‘According to my head office he’s trying to do a deal with them, a cross-border deal. Know what I mean?’
Shepreth guessed that Bazua was trying to buy immunity with the Dirty War files. ‘And are your people interested?’ he asked.
‘Hard to say,’ Vaughan told him. ‘But if you want to make a deal with him yourself I wouldn’t waste any time.’
‘Right. Thanks, Ted.’ Shepreth hung up the phone, feeling worried. If Bazua dealt his way across the border then MI6’s hopes of getting hold of the Dirty War records would disappear. And there was also a very good chance that he would consider any current female companions surplus to requirements.
‘Bad news?’ Carmen asked, appearing beside him.
He had just finished telling her what Vaughan had told him when Docherty came through the hotel doorway. The Scot looked rather dusty, having spent the last four hours bouncing north on the mail bus from Batopilas.
They went upstairs to Shepreth’s room, which didn’t look as if it had been slept in. And there was also a subtle change in the way his two partners were looking at each other, Docherty realized. As Shepreth told him the news from Mexico City he grinned at the two of them, feeling pleased for them both.
‘We can go in tomorrow night,’ he said when the MI6 man was finished, and went through what he’d discovered over the previous couple of days about the Tarahumara situation in general and Payán’s fortress in particular. ‘They won’t take part in any assault,’ he said, referring to the Indians, ‘and with good reason – their people would bear the consequences. Unlike us, they haven’t got another home to run to. But they’ll help us with intelligence – Manolo is talking to some of the women who are driven up to do Payán’s cleaning and laundry – and they’ll lend us horses. Can you two ride?’
They both could. Shepreth had learned during a short and boring posting in the Middle East, Carmen during family visits to an uncle’s ranch in the Magdalena Valley.
‘Does that mean your sister can ride too?’ Docherty asked her.
‘Better than me.’
Shepreth was spreading out his map of the area. ‘Where are we riding to?’ he asked pointedly.
Docherty didn’t answer right away. ‘There’s no problem getting in,’ he began, ‘but there’s only one road out of the valley and not many more out of the area. Even if we got a good jump on them I don’t reckon much of our chances of getting out of the state. And to get a good jump we’d have to either find and kill everyone in the place or find and destroy every means of communication they have – radio, mobile phones, whatever. Which doesn’t seem very realistic.’
He looked from one face to the other. ‘The alternative is an hour’s walk across the mountains to where the horses will be waiting, and then an eighty-kilometre ride down the Copper Canyon to Divisadero here.’ He pointed it out on the map.
‘The train?’ Shepreth said doubtfully. ‘We’d be on board the damn thing for about seven hours, and even then we’d only have got as far as Chihuahua.’
‘Aye,’ Docherty admitted, ‘but that’s one of the things in its favour – no one’ll be expecting us to just jump aboard a train that’s headed for the state capital.’
‘What’s the other?’ Carmen asked.
‘The train will be full of tourists. If all they see tomorrow night is a couple of gringos, then they’re going to have a much harder job picking us out from a train full of tourists than they would in a stolen pick-up. The Mexican police can’t
arrest a whole trainload of gringos.’
‘That makes sense,’ Shepreth admitted.
‘Where do we go from Chihuahua?’ Carmen asked.
‘North, I suppose,’ Docherty said. ‘But let’s get within striking distance before we worry about that one.’
15
Docherty landed on his toes and immediately sank to his haunches, his eyes scouring the fortress monastery’s compound. The façade of the church rose above him, the gable belfry silhouetted against the stars, while away to his right the Astro helicopter and a Dodge pick-up stood almost side by side in the middle of the stone-paved atrium.
Shepreth dropped down beside him, and the two men slipped across the ten metres that separated them from the wooden doors of the church. As Docherty had feared, they were bolted from the inside. The sentry would have to be taken out.
Half an hour ago he had been sitting smoking a cigarette just inside the open chapel, not more than twenty metres from where they now stood. He was tempted by the thought of just walking round the corner, trusting that surprise would immobilize the man for the necessary few seconds, but only for a moment. Surprised people were hard to predict, and this one was carrying a noisy-looking Uzi.
Docherty and Shepreth were carrying silenced Browning High Powers and wearing borrowed AK47s slung across their backs. The Scot gestured what he wanted the MI6 man to do, and Shepreth obliged, first taking himself round the corner of the church façade furthest from the sentry and then starting to tap the stone with the butt of his Browning.
It was not a threatening noise, but it was food for the curious. Docherty heard the chair scrape back, the boots on stone, and waited in the doorway of the church.
Perhaps the man was careful not to walk too close to the façade, or perhaps he wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other, but he was way beyond the reach of an outflung arm when he passed the doorway, and Docherty had no choice but to take him out with the gun. The Browning coughed twice, the silhouetted head jerked and the body concertinaed on to the flagstones, muffling the rattle of the Uzi which fell beneath it.
Docherty waited a few seconds but heard nothing, and went to drag the body into the church doorway, where it sat like a gruesome Guy Fawkes. He then inched his way along the façade for a view of the open chapel. The guard’s seat was empty and a packet of cigarettes lay beside it on the floor.
Shepreth was back at his shoulder now. The two of them moved silently across the chapel and the adjoining empty room to the doorway which led into the inner courtyard or cloister. According to the intelligence Manolo had gathered from those who had visited or worked there, between four and six men habitually occupied the three rooms on the opposite side of the cloister from the church. Payán’s room were almost directly above where they now stood, with windows facing out across the atrium and the valley below. His recent guest had also been given a room on the first floor, on the southern side of the cloister, above the rooms occupied by Payán’s men. The woman – and there was only one – had the room next to Bazua’s.
The cloister itself was dark, but there was a light on in one of the downstairs rooms, which hadn’t been the case half an hour before.
Shit, Docherty thought. The light could mean anything from a change of sentries to an unexpected crap. There didn’t seem much point in investigating, or at least not until they had finished their business on the second floor. Following his mental map, Docherty led Shepreth towards the nearest of the two flights of stairs.
As the two men emerged on to the upper veranda they could hear talking below them, which meant that at least two of Payán’s men were awake.
The door to Bazua’s room was slightly ajar, allowing a shaft of moonlight to illuminate the empty bed. Shepreth slipped inside, leaving Docherty to keep watch, and took out his pencil torch. There wasn’t much to look at – only a bed, a washstand with a bowl of water, an open suitcase on the floor. He knelt down beside the latter and was wading through the clothes when he noticed the rectangular bulge in the lid pocket. He pulled the zip open, extracted the heavy ledger and shone the torch on a random page: ‘…from 180 to 220 volts, two sessions with the submarine…’
‘I’ve got them,’ he whispered to Docherty, undoing the buttons of his shirt so that he could carry the ledger inside it.
And after that things began to go rather quickly.
They were heading for the woman’s room, and still about ten metres from the door, when it suddenly opened. A tall man stepped out, his nakedness exposed by the light shining out of the door, his half-erect penis sticking out in front of him like a miniature battering ram. He walked across to the edge of the veranda, where he stretched his arms above his head before dropping his hands on to the wooden rail.
Both Docherty and Shepreth recognized the man from Vaughan’s photographs – it was Ignacio Payán.
The Mexican’s face twitched in their direction, as if he had suddenly become aware that he was being watched, and his mouth was still opening when the two Brownings sent four bullets through his upper torso. He tottered for a moment, then collapsed on to the wooden floor with a loud thump, cutting off the conversation below.
Shepreth had already resumed his stride towards the woman’s room, but he was still six metres away when Marysa Salcedo appeared in the doorway with Angel Bazua’s forearm locked around her neck and what looked like a table fork pressed against her throat. They were both naked.
Shepreth stopped in his tracks about two metres ahead of Docherty.
‘I’ll kill her,’ Bazua said, then shouted for help.
The odds could only get worse. Hoping Bazua wouldn’t catch the movement in the shadows until it was too late, Docherty raised the Browning and fired, taking off the Argentinian’s right ear in a spray of blood. The hand with the fork recoiled, jerking Marysa’s head sideways and giving the Scot a clear second shot.
He sent it through Bazua’s right eye, just as an answering shout came up from below.
Shepreth ran forward as Marysa was dragged down by the dead hand around her neck. She pulled herself violently away and then started pawing at his back in what looked like a paroxysm of grief.
Shepreth reached her side and pulled her gently away. Bazua’s bare back was oozing blood from the cuts she had gouged with her nails.
‘We’ve come to take you away,’ he said in Spanish, half conscious of running feet below. ‘Your sister Carmen’s outside waiting for you,’ he added.
At the word ‘Carmen’ she turned her face towards his as if she couldn’t believe it. ‘Carmen is here?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Shepreth told her. She was as beautiful as her sister, he thought, but there hardly seemed room for anything but fear in her eyes.
Docherty emerged from the room with a handful of clothes just as feet sounded on the front stairs. As he scooped the naked woman up in his arms and half ran with her towards the other end of the building, Shepreth brought his AK47 into position and fired off a burst in the direction of the charging shadows on the stairs.
In the other stairwell Docherty was helping Marysa into her clothes, but hardly noticing what a lovely body she had. ‘I can manage,’ she told him curtly, and he realized that he’d been stupid to assume that Victoria Marin’s psychological escape route would also be hers. Whatever arrangements Carmen’s sister had made with herself for the sake of sanity, they obviously hadn’t included a flight into dreamland.
‘I’m ready,’ she said.
Docherty indicated that Shepreth and Marysa should go first, and as the MI6 man led the woman down the stairs the Scot fired a last burst down the length of the veranda with his own AK47.
At the bottom of the stairs Shepreth found there was only one way out, and that led into the open cloister. He hesitated a second, saw no one on the far side, then grabbed Marysa’s hand and made a dash for the door which led into the church. Finding it shut but mercifully unlocked, he heaved open the heavy wooden door, bundled her through and stepped in after her, just as bul
lets ricocheted around the stone columns to his left.
Docherty was still in the other doorway. The flash from the guns told him Payán’s men were in the far corner of the cloister, and that to reach the outside world they would have to cross his line of fire. ‘I’ll keep the bastards busy,’ he yelled to Shepreth. ‘Get her over the wall and come back in through the open chapel.’
‘OK,’ Shepreth shouted back, just as the Scot opened up with a murderous burst from the AK47. He grabbed Marysa’s hand and hurried her through the empty church. There were no seats, no pulpit – only a wide stone floor dappled by the silver moonlight from the windows.
Reaching the front door, he removed the long wooden bolt and gingerly pulled open one door. Docherty was still firing repeated bursts across the cloister next door, and if any of Payán’s men had made it through to the atrium Shepreth couldn’t hear or see them. He ran for the wall, one hand ready with the Browning, the other pulling Marysa after him. ‘Carmen!’ he shouted.
‘I’m here,’ came a hopeful voice from beyond the wall.
‘Your sister’s coming over,’ he told her, cupping his hands like a stirrup to help her up on to the top of the wall. The moment her foot had left his hand he was heading back towards the buildings at a run, only slowing slightly as he turned the corner towards the entrance to the open chapel.
They were only about five metres apart when they saw each other, and their fingers must have clenched on the triggers at exactly the same moment. For the longest split second of his life Shepreth stared down the barrel of the Mexican’s gun, then a hammer seemed to hit him on the chest, knocking him his back on to the edge of the steps. I’m dead, he thought, but the stars were still shining above him.
Days of the Dead Page 22
