I opened the belly of one of the females, using my hands to part the stomach panels as if opening a thin curtain. She had net burns on her delicate skin-this was the female who’d called for help.
They’d emptied everything out of her, but for one small oversight. There was a partially developed pup in her womb. I left the dead infant where it was, then knelt, and searched through the viscera. “Was there anything in their bellies?”
“One small catfish, nothing else. They were very hungry.” The young hunter laughed and added, “Like our families. But not now. Tonight, we will have a feast!”
Keesha told me, “Do you believe me now? This is an evil place.”
We were walking through the village, up a mud road. Among the huts, naked children played in banana thickets while scrawny dogs lay in pools of sunlight, cleaning themselves. We’d been told that a man who lived on the outskirts of the village was very rich and might have a cell phone we could use, so we were searching for him.
To Keesha, I said, “I don’t know about evil, but it certainly isn’t very attractive.”
“No!” she said. “Evil! The botos, the pink ladies-they are sacred animals. How can you have lived and not know about them? At night, they grow hair and walk away from the Tefe River. They have magical powers-they’re witches. They will punish this village. They’ll destroy it. We must leave very soon!”
She was very agitated. Killing human beings didn’t seem to bother her nearly so much. I told her, “I don’t see much worth destroying. But, yeah, I’m with you. The sooner we get away from here, the better.”
The wealthiest man in the village was a middle-aged Irishman with blood-bleary eyes who wore Birkenstock sandals, hiking shorts, a native shirt made of colorful patches, and a black beret over his long gray hair, which he wore tied in a ponytail.
Unlike the other shacks in the village, his house was made of unpainted concrete block and shingle, with a muddy yard protected by an out-of-place white picket fence. Parked out front, half in the road, was a new Toyota 4-Lux, a shortbed pickup truck papered with bumper stickers: Vegetarians Are Delicious!
To Become Master, Pose as a Servant.
Free Erin!
Life Is a Sexually Transmitted Disease.
He didn’t open the door immediately when I knocked. There was a blanket covering the house’s main window. The blanket moved, and I saw a nose press against the glass. A few moments later, the door cracked opened an inch or two.
The Irish accent was unmistakable, even though he spoke in Spanish: “Who are you? Why are you here?”
Paranoia isn’t paranoia if someone is really after you. This guy’s voice had the sound of genuine fear.
I replied in English, “I need to use a phone. It’s very important. I’ll pay you, no problem.”
The door cracked slightly wider, and I could see a wedge of his red Irish skin, and one dark eye. “Tell me who you are, what you’re doing here. There’re no gringos in this village. They don’t belong.”
I almost asked, Then what are you doing here?
Instead, I took refuge in an old, familiar lie. I explained to him that I was a marine biologist, here to do research on the rare Amazonian dolphin but that my boat had been stolen. Because I had friends in the village of Remanso, waiting on me, I had to contact them immediately.
I added, “If you drive me there, I’ll pay you whatever you want. A couple hundred dollars? Three hundred? In American money. It’s that important. Or let me use your phone. Please.”
He looked at me, then looked at the heavy, plastic briefcase. “What’a you got in there?”
“Cameras, research equipment. A waterproof case is the only way to protect the stuff.”
He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Wait here. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
When he closed the door, I heard him lock it behind him.
I looked at Keesha. “You said there was an evil man in this village. Is that him?”
“No. He’s a drunk. Could you not smell him? The evil man lives on top of the mountain. Up there.”
I followed her gaze to the west. High above us, several miles away, atop the rain-scarred hillside, was what looked to be a clustering of big houses.
“He lives there,” she said. “I have heard stories that people go into that house and never return. He’s the one my people call the Bad Gift. He’s an American-like you.”
The Irishman came out carrying a beat-up Nokia cell telephone. “It’s all charged up, but you can’t get a signal here,” he said. “I’ll have to drive you to the top of the hill. Until we got all that goddamn jungle cut down, you couldn’t even get a signal up there.” He paused. “It’s gonna cost you a hundred bucks, Yank. In advance.”
As I paid him, Keesha said to me, “He’s not going to take us to the big house on the hill? We must not let him take us there.”
I looked at the Irishman, to see if he understood the question. He replied, “Take you to Tyner’s place? You don’t go looking for Curtis Tyner. He comes looking for you.”
“He’s an American?” I asked.
The Irishman replied, “He used to be. I’m not sure if he even knows anymore. Or cares.”
When we were loaded in the pickup truck, Keesha between us, the Irishman lighted a cigarette, and told us his name was Niall, no surname offered. It reinforced the impression that he was afraid of something, on the run.
“How long have you lived here, Niall?”
“Too fucking long. This place is hell when it comes to civilized things, things we take for granted back in the world. Women, though. ..” He swung his chin toward Keesha. “You can have all the girls you want, and as young as you want.” As if she were not there, he added, “And a lot more comely than this one. She looks a little used up. The jungle girls. They don’t flower for long. Give me another ten bucks, I’ll find you two girls a hell of a lot prettier than this one.”
We drove the rest of the way up the mountainside in silence, the back of the truck fishtailing on the slick orange clay. Once, the Irishman came very close to losing control completely, and we nearly slid over an embankment that would have dropped us several hundred feet into a gully.
The girl had reached for me involuntarily, her small hands tight on my arm, yet the stoic expression on her face did not change. Even when she said, “It is not so interesting as I thought it might be.”
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“Riding in an automobile. I thought it would be as interesting as paddling my obada. But it is not. It gives my stomach a sick feeling. Do people ever recover from this sickness?”
Thus I knew it was her first time in a car.
Several hundred feet above the village, near a ditch already overgrown with scrub bush and weeds, the Irishman braked to a stop. He handed the phone to me, and said, “Step out of the truck, you may have to move around a wee bit. But you should get a signal.”
I walked away from the truck, taking a slip of paper from my billfold on which I’d written Harrington’s number and a couple of others. The paper was sticky wet from being dumped in the river, though still readable.
But I never got a chance to finish dialing. As I straightened my glasses and began touching buttons on the phone, a half-dozen Latin-looking men, heavily armed and dressed in camo, stepped out of the bushes.
I stood there motionless, with no way to respond. I’d taken off my holster prior to entering the village, and I’d left the briefcase in the truck.
In Spanish, one of the guerrillas yelled, “If you move or try to run, we will kill you both!”
To my left, I heard the door of the Toyota slam shut, and I looked to see the Irishman drag Keesha out onto the ground as, in the far distance, a green Humvee sped toward us, kicking up a rooster tail of mud.
As I raised my hands above my head, I said to Niall, “You have me, there’s no reason to hurt her.”
In reply, the Irishman said to the guerrillas, “Search him while I see what the bastard�
�s got in this case. Sergeant Tyner is on his way.”
28
I’m not certain what I expected to see when the door of the Humvee opened, but it was not the astonishing figure that now approached me. Curtis Tyner-for it could have been no one else-was only slightly over five feet tall, and he had fire-bright red hair and bristling orange muttonchops of a type that I associate with Scottish bagpipers from a previous century. The hair of his beard was combed out away from his cheeks so that his face would have been orangutan-like in size and form but for the huge, waxed handlebar mustache that swept up toward his blue eyes.
Belted around his waist was a semiautomatic pistol and an attack/survival knife in a leather scabbard. His tiger-striped camouflage tactical dress-pants the same as mine-were bloused perfectly into his jungle boots. He wore a black beret cocked low over his right eye, and carried a leather swagger stick, which he used to slap the palm of his left hand as he approached. The T-shirt he wore was dark blue with a bright-yellow inner layer. Golden letters over the left breast read: British Royal Marines
Special Boat Service
M Squadron
Pinned on to the beret, I noticed, were a golden death’s head, along with a dagger and wreath that may have been from the South African Special Forces Brigade. There was also a patch that read: 1st SFOD-Delta Force.
An eclectic and unlikely mix of associations.
Tyner stopped a few paces in front of me, looked into my eyes-a chilly look of appraisal and indifference-and said in Spanish as he continued to look into my face, “What did you find on him?”
Standing beside the truck, with Keesha on the ground at his feet, the Irishman spoke first. “He’s got enough weaponry here to start his own fuckin’ war. He’s no bloody marine biologist, that much I promise you, Sergeant.”
The guerrilla who had searched me walked through the mud with the papers and false passport he’d taken and handed them to Tyner.
Tyner was silent for a minute or two as he read through the papers, then he shoved them back toward the guerrilla.
“Your name is Marion North? Says here that an electronics corporation out of Virginia sent you down here to help us do a little housekeeping. That you’re a retired commander, Navy Special Warfare. Is that true, Commander North?”
He was an American. The man’s accent was rural Midwestern, pure farm country, and he communicated suspicion with the easy, breezy friendliness that I have heard many times before from people of that region. Sometimes you’ve got to follow your instincts and take a chance. My guess was that he’d been in Colombia long enough to know how the system worked, what papers were real and which were counterfeit.
It was not a good time to lie, but maybe not a good time to tell the truth, either. So I said, “It wouldn’t make a lot of sense, them sending me into your territory, would it?”
“Exactly my point. And make no mistake Commander-if you really are a naval officer-this is my territory. I worked my ass off taking it-and keeping it. In the old days, they had a name for people like you-claim jumper. Or maybe spy. Who knows.” He smiled at me, but his eyes glazed slightly as he added, “Either way, they executed them. Tradition! I’m a stickler for tradition. So tell me why you’re really here. The truth. You’ve only got one chance, and I don’t much care either way. For starters, are you here looking for me?”
I said, “No, I’m looking for two men. A Samoan named Stallings, and an albino named Kazan.”
The little sergeant nodded. “One of those names is vaguely familiar. And why have you come to my territory looking for these two gentleman?”
I looked at Keesha, who was still on the ground, afraid to move. I thought for a moment before I said, “Tell that Irish Republican Army piece of shit to get away from the girl, then tell your men to leave us in private. They don’t need to hear what I have to say. You have my word, Sergeant. I’ll tell you the truth. But it’s classified.”
For some reason, Tyner found that funny. He looked at the Irishman. “You can’t fault his ability to judge character, McCauley! And right he is!”
Still laughing, Tyner said to me, “The cowardly bastard, McCauley, blew up a bunch of civilians with a bomb. So he’s scurried off to the jungle to hide. Hates it here. Always worried about snakes and diseases, and someone like me coming along and cashing him in. He’s got a hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head, so he’s paying me off a little at a time. Information, snitch work-grunt stuff that a man with any character couldn’t stomach. Still got a long way to go, don’t you, McCauley?”
Tyner pushed me toward the Humvee, waving for Keesha to follow, while behind us, the Irishman yelled, “I gave you two of them, Sergeant. No matter what you do with ’em, you still have to give me credit for both. That’s our deal. Two heads, Sergeant. I want it applied to my debt!”
Standing at the rear of the Humvee, aware that, from a distance, his men had their weapons trained on me, I told Tyner the whole story.
The real reason for me being there was no threat to his own strange operation, so I risked nothing in telling him the truth. The only details I omitted were which people and agencies had helped me.
When I was finished, he asked a few questions about my life in Florida, a little bit about my lab. He wanted to confirm that I really was a marine biologist come in search of friends. He took pains to be certain of that. Judging from the articulate questions he asked, he, in fact, seemed to have a pretty good general knowledge of natural science.
Living on an eroding mountainside above a dying river, that surprised me. I’m not sure why.
Then he said, “So you’re really not a commander with Navy Special Warfare?”
I shook my head slowly. “No.”
“But your name is Marion North.”
“Nope, that’s a cover, too. It’s Ford. Marion D. Ford.”
“Marion D. Ford, huh?” He nodded, thinking about that, looking up at me through the framework of his orange mustache, blue eyes glittering. “So why’d the CIA geeks agree to set you up? Help you find your pals? I took one look at your papers, and I knew who’d made them. You wouldn’t be the first they sent out to check on me.”
I said carefully, “I can’t and won’t confirm that it was a specific agency. In the past, I did some work for the State Department. Foreign-service variety. Not directly for any agency; sort of a contract thing. But some people in high places owed me favors. My friends who’ve been kidnapped are important to me. I pressed until certain people agreed to help.”
He slapped the swagger stick into his palm. “Okay, that’s just vague enough to be the truth. I believe you, Ford. Copacetic. Everything is copacetic. You look like you could use some food and some sleep. But…” He looked toward the men covering us, and gave a hand signal-they could relax and go about their business. “But first things first. You say you left five bodies upriver? Let’s go to headquarters, I’ll get out a topographical map. I want you to show me exactly where. The Colombian government will be searching for that chopper, and my men need to get to the bodies before they do. That’s money in my pocket.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “The dead guerrillas, that’s what I mean. I’ll collect the bounty for them. It’s what I do here. Business comes first, understand. I’ll give you a percentage, if you want, but not much. Or maybe I’ll pay you back by helping you out with your problem. Either way, you and the Indio girl may have done the killing, but I’m the one with the contract, all the permits. Without me, you could kill a thousand of the bastards, and you wouldn’t get a cent. Consider me generous just to include you, Dr. Ford. I don’t have to do a damn… do a damn…”
Tyner then paused, as if surprised by something, allowing the sentence to trail off before saying very softly, almost as if speaking to himself: “Dr. Ford? Marion Ford. Marion D. Ford.”
He said it as if struggling to remember some lost bit of data.
Then he looked up at me, eyes wide, his face an illust
ration of what might have been shock, as he whispered, “My God! You’re him. Dr. Marion Ford. I knew about you. You’re one of the Negotiators!”
I was so surprised by his reaction that I couldn’t speak for a moment, but then in a flat voice, I finally replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He slapped the swagger stick into his palm again. “I’m right. I know I’m right. You’re one of about ten guys with the W designation. You are him. I can see it in your face. Jesus Christ, man, you’re one of my heroes! What you did in Cuba, your work in Cambodia, it’s legendary. The way you took out the Soviet attache in Managua, the way you set him up-‘Let’s go spearfishing, comrade’-it was a masterwork. A piece of art. And that anarchist professor who disappeared from the bar in Aspen. Hell, man, I know a lot about you. I’ve studied your work.”
In the same flat tone, I said, “Sorry. Mistaken identity. You’re confusing me with someone else.”
“Hey, Ford, you can trust me. A couple years back, a guy named Heller-you trained together, according to him. He was here, doing the same kind’a work I do. Blaine Heller. An amazing man. He told me if anything happened to him, I should destroy all his files. He bought it in a chopper crash, so I burned all his papers. But I read them first-hell, who wouldn’t? That’s how I know about you.”
I waited but said nothing. Blaine Heller had been a good, good man. An intelligent, perceptive man who loved literature and fine art. What could have possibly driven him to come to this dark place?
Tyner stopped talking, grinned, and slapped his knee with the swagger stick, then thrust out his right hand to me. “Curtis Tyner, U.S. Army, Green Berets and Delta Force at your service, Dr. Ford! This is an honor. Damn glad to meet you.”
He began waving me toward the Humvee. “Come. I’ll radio ahead, have my staff lay out some food for you. I’ve got a couple prime Kobe steaks from Japan I’ve been saving. Anything you want. Finally, I meet a man who’s truly going to appreciate what I’ve done here. My place-it’s a… well, hell, it’s a warrior’s palace.” The little sergeant made an open-handed gesture of delight. “We have so much in common, you’re not going to believe it.”
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