The Girl Who Had No Fear

by Marnie Riches

  ‘And if you think you can take the easy way out of this by sinking that sub or trying to get us spotted by the coast guard in the hope that they’ll rescue your sorry ass,’ Jorge continued, ‘I’ll kill you with my own bare hands.’

  ‘Thanks for the handy suggestion,’ he said, quiet enough to go unheard.

  Now, as they followed the sub’s trailer, pulled by mules across the rutted land, under cover of the jungle’s dense canopy, he contemplated how he might do exactly as Jorge had suggested. Get caught. It was the only way. Until now, he had had no opportunity whatsoever to contemplate escape. They had been watching him continually and he had had nothing but uninhabited wilderness and no water supply for miles around. But now … The risk of Jorge putting a bullet in him was high, but it was a calculated risk. How likely was it that one of these guys, when faced with the possibility of being caught red-handed by the Federales or coast guard, manning a sub that contained tonnes and tonnes of meth, would think first of saving his own skin and abandon that million-dollar tub before you could count uno, dos, tres? He allowed himself an almost imperceptible smile.

  ‘What are you so damned happy about?’ Jorge asked, poking him in the back with the sight of the rifle. Perhaps escaping this particular guard’s beady-eyed stare was going to prove more difficult than anticipated.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy. I’m looking forward to a change of scenery. That’s all.’

  Beyond the trees, he knew there was a glorious Caribbean sunset. The jungle was suffused with a pink glow. But as the daylight started to fail, the mosquitoes buzzed and whined around him, landing on his sweat-slick skin where it was exposed. Lightning-quick will-o’-the-wisps that he could never slap away before they had already drunk their fill of his blood. The itching would be unbearable later. At least in the cartel’s secret compound, where he shared a shack with a kidnapped American chemist from San Diego, mosquito nets were provided for when darkness fell.

  Three days in a boiling hot, poorly ventilated, overloaded sub with Jorge and arms and legs covered in mosquito bites, he thought. I must have been some son of a bitch in a previous life to deserve this torture. He wondered briefly if there was any mileage in praying to the skeletal figure of Santa Muerte, as the Mexican gang members did. Would she look kindly on him and help him to derail his journey along this particular route to the afterlife? Was that how these things worked?

  Too bad he was no longer a religious man.

  Even amid the cacophony of noise from the nocturnal jungle creatures as they came out to play and hunt, the growling of his empty stomach was audible. With sweat rolling off his emaciated frame at an unsustainable rate, his mouth had been dry and cracked at the edges for hours.

  ‘Drink,’ he said, his voice now little more than a croak.

  ‘Sure. Share mine.’ Jorge cracked open a new bottle of mineral water and drank thirstily until there were only one or two mouthfuls in the bottom. He grinned nastily. ‘Don’t take it all or I’ll cut your greedy tongue out.’

  Being careful to take only one swig, his concentration lapsed momentarily. He tripped on the root of a wild tamarind tree. Landed heavily on his knees, yelping. Insects scuttled away into the undergrowth. He imagined that he saw the spotted pelt of a muscular jaguar, moving stealthily in the tropical thicket, only metres away. He envied it its power and liberty.

  ‘Get up, you useless piece of shit,’ Jorge said, thumping him in the shoulder with the butt of the rifle. ‘You want me to tell el cocodrilo that you’d sooner be pet food than captain his submarine?’

  Shaking his head, he willed himself to stand tall, not wanting to show any emotional weakness. His pride and dignity were all he had left, after all. Though having shared a bucket as a latrine for years with the Texan chemist, there wasn’t even much left of that.

  The procession presently started to head down a slope that had been cut into the otherwise flat terrain of the jungle. The rumble of traffic was audible some way off. He calculated that it must be highway 307 that ran the length of the coast. Naturally, they would have to cross that somehow to get from the jungle interior to the sea.

  Deeper and deeper they went, until walls of soil and tree roots rose above them on either side. In the twilight, he could make out an arch – the entrance to a tunnel, jet-black where the remaining light of the day could not penetrate. The rumble of traffic grew progressively louder, shaking the excavated ground. He could hear miniature landslides of sandy soil hitting the ground as it was dislodged by the weight of some heavy goods vehicle, thundering its way along the highway from the south up to Cancun with its delivery of bananas or trafficked and desperate Mexicans and Guatemalans, hiding among produce, hoping to head across the Gulf of Mexico and into Florida under cover of darkness.

  ‘Is the tunnel safe?’ he asked Jorge. The scouts that led the group shone torches inside the underground path that danced in beams on the makeshift walls. ‘Every time a truck goes over, that’s a lot of weight to bear.’

  ‘How the fuck should I know, mecánico?’ Even in the murk of dusk, at least four metres below the floor of the jungle, he could see his guard’s disparaging sneer. ‘They’ve got plenty of dorks like you working for them. Maybe they got a tunnel genius or some shit to make it. You spend a couple of million dollars on a sub, you’re not going to take a chance on a tunnel collapsing on your head are you?’ He tutted. ‘And stop fucking asking questions or I’ll shove a snake in your pants when you’re sleeping, you smart ass.’

  Contemplating their journey to the Dominican Republic, he wondered if Jorge slept deeply. Even a drug-fuelled pig like him would have to sleep at some point during the course of three days. Having designed the sub to evade radar, sonar and infrared detection, he would have to come up with some cunning way of scuppering the vessel’s invisibility, sabotaging the voyage by alerting the coast guard to their presence. It was the only way. Providing the damned thing didn’t take water on board first.

  In the tunnel, he could barely see. Jorge took a torch out from the back pocket of his jeans and shone the harsh light into his face.

  ‘Don’t think you’re going to slip away while we’re down here. There’s nowhere to go, and Jorge’s got his eye on you.’ Jorge shone the torch onto his own face from his chin upwards, giving himself a ghoulish appearance, drawing attention to the black teardrops that had been tattooed on his lower eyelids. A card-carrying killer. Though he was already well aware of that. There were entry-level expectations when it came to the upper echelons of the Coba cartel.

  Down there, the air smelled of soil, rotten foliage and decaying excreta from the animals who had instinctively worked out that this was a safe route to the other side of the highway. Water from the recent tropical rains had accumulated and now pooled at their feet, seeping into his ramshackle boots. Looking behind him, he did wonder if he could somehow backtrack and bolt for the jungle. But the excavated path was so narrow and enclosed by the high walls of earth that Jorge would have no trouble in picking him off with a well-aimed shot. Dust fell from the unsupported roof above. No props. Nothing to stop the entire thing from caving in. No engineer had cast an eye over this tunnel’s construction.

  The falling dust turned to clumps of earth dropping onto his head as they reached what he guessed was the midway-point of the tunnel. The rumble of a truck in the distance grew louder, reverberating around the inexpertly dug thoroughfare.

  ‘Christ! It’s going to cave in,’ he shouted, realising that if the tunnel collapsed, it would cause a sinkhole in the highway. They would be crushed beneath an inevitable multiple pile-up of cars and trucks. ‘We need to run!’

  ‘Don’t talk crap,’ Jorge said.

  His voice was all but drowned out by the deafening thunder of the truck directly above them. Earth and rocks started to fall in earnest as deadly hard rain.

  CHAPTER 30

  Mexico, Hotel Bahia Maya, Cancun, then, the Yucatan jungle, 30 May

  The insistent knocking at the door of
his hotel room jolted Van den Bergen awake.

  ‘Where am I?’ he said, wiping the string of drool from his jaw and staring at the ceiling fan that spun above him. Then he remembered. ‘Shit.’ Glanced at his alarm clock that said 11 p.m. Still jet-lagged and exhausted from being dragged to a bodega where his stomach acid had consumed nearly everything in the place, he had made his excuses and passed out on his bed by 9.30 p.m. So, who the hell was this?

  He padded to the door, wearing only his pants. Wondered briefly if it was George. Peered through the spyhole. More knocking with some force behind it.

  ‘Gonzales?’

  Opening the door, the Mexican detective pushed his way into his room. ‘Get dressed, Paul,’ he said, the excitable grin sliding from his face as he spotted Van den Bergen’s sternum-to-abdomen scarring. He turned away abruptly and began to study the plan of the hotel on the fire escape notice, pinned to the door.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ Van den Bergen peered down at the back of his head, trying to work out what the hell was going on.

  ‘No, my friend,’ Gonzales said, his attention still fixed on the door. ‘I’m sitting in the bar with Baldini and I get emailed anonymously with GPS co-ordinates for a location in the jungle. I figure, maybe it’s a hoax or maybe it’s real intel about cartel activity, right? It’s worth checking out. So, I send the highway patrol guys to take a look. And you’ll never guess what.’

  ‘No. I guess I never will.’

  ‘They spotted a huge meth lab and what looks like some accommodation in active use. They’re waiting on me and my guys for backup. I thought you’d want you to come with us. Baldini is waiting outside.’

  Pulling a T-shirt over his upper body, Van den Bergen tugged a pair of jeans from his case and a clean pair of socks. ‘You can turn around now,’ he said. ‘I’m decent.’

  ‘Aren’t you hot in jeans, man?’ Gonzales asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘And socks?’

  ‘Malaria.’ Van den Bergen did not clarify further.

  ‘You won’t get malaria here!’

  ‘Are there mosquitoes?’

  ‘Naturally!’

  ‘Then I’m wearing jeans and socks.’ Hastily, he resprayed his arms with strong Deet. It wouldn’t do to get bitten. He had heard the test for malaria involved giving a blood sample every day for three days running. No bloody way.

  As the police truck bounced along a rutted track that led deep into the nocturnal blackness of the Yucatan jungle, Van den Bergen was irritated to see that he couldn’t get a signal on his phone. What if George had been in touch? Marie had finally confessed that she had bought a ticket to Toncontín airport in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa on George’s behalf. But where was his contrary, absent lover now?

  ‘I can’t wait to see if this is the source of the bad meth,’ Baldini said, talking over the chatter of Gonzales and his uniformed driver at the front of the truck. ‘I sure as hell hope it is. I don’t wanna see no more dead kids on the back of it.’

  Van den Bergen wrinkled his nose at the smell of beer on the American. He stared in silence into the dense tangle of trees and palms, feeling strongly that they were on a wild-goose chase on which George had persuaded Minks to waste thousands of the department’s euros. Even if the meth lab did turn out to be connected to his floaters, he had no jurisdiction over a Mexican cartel. Hell, even the Mexican authorities had little control over the cartel bosses. The problem was endemic throughout Central America. And he had bigger problems in the Rotterdam Silencer being back on the scene in Amsterdam. The very thought made the hole in his hip, left over a decade earlier by a bullet that had been shot from the gun of that drug-dealing morally bankrupt bastard, twitch painfully.

  ‘We’re here,’ Gonzales said, peering into the darkness through the windscreen. They had pulled up alongside another Policía truck. He tossed two bullet-proof vests into the back. ‘Put these on, guys, and stay behind my men.’

  Suddenly, it occurred to Van den Bergen that he was placing himself in mortal danger on a continent and in a country that had nothing to do with him or the Dutch police. Hadn’t he sworn to his daughter, Tamara, that he would take more care of himself now that he had little Eva in his life? Fastening the clips of the vest, his hands started to shake. He clutched the Kevlar tightly, hoping that, in the poor light, Baldini wouldn’t have noticed his weakness.

  Pull yourself together, you lanky streak of piss, he admonished himself. You’re more experienced than the lot of these swaggering tits. You have the battle scars to prove it. Now is not the time to lose your nerve.

  Whispering instructions to his uniforms, Gonzales motioned that they should creep forwards alongside him towards the compound.

  At first, Van den Bergen could see nothing apart from the strobing light of the torches, held by the uniforms who led the way. Dry stalks crunched underfoot. The heady smell of chlorophyll was everywhere. The jungle rang with the sound of cicadas chirruping and the eerie cries of strange, exotic creatures that called out into the night. Then, he became aware of the shapes of the trees. The pitch black was no longer quite as impenetrable.

  ‘Look!’ Baldini whispered.

  Van den Bergen squinted beyond the fat leaves of some tropical bush and caught his first glimpse of a clearing that was dimly lit by one or two lights, strung high on tree trunks – no doubt powered by a generator, hidden somewhere on the makeshift cartel complex, judging by the low thrum.

  The team of policemen gathered in the treeline in silence, guns drawn. Van den Bergen could feel the adrenalin being pumped around his body. At last, his thoughts had turned from mosquitoes and snake venom to the thrill of a raid. He reached for his service weapon but remembered that he had left it locked in the safe back home. No place for that, here, where he was only a guest.

  ‘Vámonos!’ Gonzales whispered.

  With Van den Bergen and Baldini bringing up the rear, the law enforcers crept into the clearing, working in twos. The set-up resembled a tiny hamlet fashioned from corrugated iron shacks that had been traditionally thatched with giant palm leaves, presumably to prevent them from being spotted by helicopters flying overhead, Van den Bergen assessed.

  The Mexican police dipped into each dwelling, guns drawn. Withdrew, shaking their heads at Gonzales, whose weapon was trained more generally on the scene. He directed his men to search the subsequent shacks.

  ‘Nada,’ they said, approaching and speaking to him in Spanish.

  Gonzales sighed and turned to Van den Bergen and Baldini. ‘There’s nobody here. Let’s take a look around.’

  Most of the shacks showed signs of having been slept in – mosquito nets, discarded water bottles, makeshift pump-up mattresses and a bucket full of human waste in the corner.

  ‘They’ve been sleeping two to a shack,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘And look! This one has handcuffs at the end of heavy chains, welded to the walls.’

  ‘Prisoners?’ Baldini said, taking a pen from his pocket and lifting the opened cuffs into the air for closer inspection.

  Van den Bergen nodded. ‘Poor bastards. It’s like a prisoner-of-war camp. Who do you think these were for?’

  Gonzales shrugged. ‘If they were worth cuffing, they sure as hell weren’t cartel gang members. You cuff slaves or a prisoner that has value. So I’d say either women used for sex by the men or specialists, working in the lab, maybe. Who knows?’

  Inside the other shacks, there was evidence of a communal area with a rough dining table and benches, where people ate, and a kitchenette, where food had clearly been prepared.

  ‘They’re not long gone,’ Van den Bergen said, sniffing at a supermarket packet of cheese; rummaging through some salad that had been left inside a beer fridge, powered by an extension cable that had been plugged into the generator outside.

  ‘This place looks like it’s been abandoned in a hurry,’ Baldini said.

  ‘Maybe it hasn’t been abandoned,’ Van den Bergen said, stalking into the adjacent shack. ‘Look!’ He called his counterparts inside an
d pointed to an old portable television that sat on a wooden crate. It was still on. ‘I’d say they’re very much planning on coming back!’

  Behind a screen of green, the largest of the shacks was a solid-looking prefabricated Portakabin, about four metres long. Its roof had been covered with palm leaves and other foliage, purely for camouflage purposes – that much was clear.

  When Van den Bergen stepped inside, he gasped. The sizeable space contained a well-equipped meth lab, the likes of which would not have been out of place in a university science department. ‘Jesus.’ He whistled low at the sight of the oversized bell jars, test tubes and barrels of chemicals on the floor. ‘It’s a bit different from what I saw in the Czech Republic. Those guys were amateurs. But this? This is a professional rig-up, if ever I saw one.’

  ‘It’s clean, for a start,’ Gonzales said, looking around at the spotless white space. ‘Money has been spent on this.’

  Van den Bergen approached one of the barrels. Examined a label on the side. ‘Chinese,’ he said, failing to understand what was written in the unfamiliar script. ‘But hang on!’ He leaned over and examined the far side of the barrel. There was an export label, with the company name, ‘InterChem GmbH’, written on the side. ‘This has been shipped from China to a German company,’ he said, frowning. He turned to Baldini. ‘Can you give me a hand? Let’s see what’s on the bottom of this baby.’

  ‘Sure.’

  His muscles screamed in complaint as they lifted the heavy barrel onto its side. Van den Bergen gasped as he stood, pain spasming in his hip. Grinding his molars in a bid to quash the agony, he leaned over and scrutinised the base of the barrel. There was another label showing the German company’s name. He ran his fingers over it. Smooth and warm – it felt too thick to be just one piece of paper.