Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  “Only the government could do that,” he said.

  Not everyone who works for the government works only for the government, I thought.

  “My men would have found it,” Roldan said.

  Right. The same team that had left the Beretta on the mountaintop.

  I increased my pace and Roldan did too. The path kept crossing the river. More stones, mossy this time. I didn’t need Roldan’s hand, but his grip was comforting.

  He said, “When you spoke to Vandenburg, did he mention a man named Navas?”

  My feet felt like they were floating inches off the path. I was no longer tired. I could walk like this forever.

  “Did he mention Navas? Or the Angel?”

  I shook my head. Angel Navas was Roldan’s former partner, jailed for life, dead in prison.

  “Naylor,” Roldan said. “What does he look like?”

  I described him, reclining on the chaise in the golden room.

  Roldan shook his head at the vagueness of my description. “What is the color of his eyes?”

  “His hat shaded them, but they were pale. The hair I could see was medium brown. He was heavyset, kind of pudgy. A narrow face, though.” The weight gain could have been recent, I thought.

  “Did he walk with a limp?”

  “He didn’t walk at all, but there was a walking stick, a cane, in the room. Does he seem familiar? Do you know him? He lives in a house owned by BrackenCorp.”

  “What is this BrackenCorp?” Roldan asked.

  “A defense contractor.”

  I no longer concentrated on finding a footfall; my feet seemed to take care of themselves, leaving my mind to speculate. Were the people at the airport DEA? Was the U.S. government using me to find Roldan? It didn’t make sense. DEA might bend the rules, but they didn’t kidnap children. DEA had no interest in pre-Columbian gold.

  Fifteen minutes later, the helicopter buzz sounded again. I couldn’t tell if it was the same copter or a second one. It was louder and closer, but the canopy of trees enveloped us. I couldn’t see anything above the interlocking branches except a scrap of blue sky. I knew I was walking fast, but it seemed that I was barely moving. I was hurrying, racing, but I had all the time in the world.

  Roldan said, “If it’s not the government, if it’s a private company, they would not wish their activities to be made public. They should have made the deal. Paolina for the wounded man.”

  “Yes.”

  “But they did not.”

  “Maybe the phone is broken.” The ground moved beneath my feet; I didn’t feel it.

  “The helicopters don’t fly here,” he said. “No, they’re closing in on the camp, triangulating the signal. There must be a transmitter.”

  He redoubled his pace. We followed a different, steeper course than the one we’d ascended, tracing the path of a plunging stream. It took all my balance, fine-tuned by the coca leaves, to keep from toppling into the rapids. The stream disappeared to the right and soon the trail was nothing but a thin line of footprints through the jungle with an occasional stone for a guidepost.

  “I can’t wait for you,” Roldan said after fifteen minutes at a furious pace. “And I can’t give you my gun. If you meet fighters, hide, and later, someone will come for you.”

  Yeah. Right. Friend or foe? Where the hell did he carry a gun?

  “Can you throw a knife?” Maybe he saw the question in my eyes.

  “It’s better than nothing.”

  “If I had another weapon, I would give it to you.” I believed him. But I didn’t tell him I had a gun.

  “Roldan, if you get killed, Paolina will—”

  “I’ll do my best not to get killed. If it is my day to die, then I will

  die.”

  He forged ahead, disappearing into a thicket of high bushes. I tried to keep up with him. I tried, but he faded into the trackless jungle. For a little while I could hear his footsteps. Then nothing.

  CHAPTER 31

  My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti. My feet told me to sit, to lie down in the lush greenery and sleep, but coca leaves and adrenaline pumped through my veins, and I moved more quickly than I believed possible, stumbling over roots, slipping on mossy outcroppings, falling over stones.

  If it is my day to die, then I will die.

  What a useful sentiment. What goddamn wonderful heroics. What a totally useless, stupid thing to say. What machismo, what arrogance. No wonder the man reminded me of Sam Gianelli. Go ahead, I thought angrily. Charge in solo, against all odds. Get yourself killed, dammit. Heroism is easy. What’s goddamn hard is survival, figuring out how to survive, how to take care of the children so they don’t wind up in an orphanage after the disaster. Death is quick and final. Survival is long and hard.

  Anger drove me downhill. If Roldan died, filled with his mysterious silences, carrying the answers to my unanswered questions to the grave, how would I find my little girl? Where the hell would I look?

  Roldan, as he disappeared, had veered slightly to the left. I glanced at the sun overhead, calibrating the direction the man had taken. I kept to the left, chose the route that led most steeply downhill. Vines grabbed at my face and shoulders. Branches seemed to glower overhead. Roots tripped me. It felt like I was caught in someone else’s nightmare.

  I only realized I’d been hearing the steady noise of the chopper’s motor when it abruptly ceased. The next sound I heard over my own ragged breathing was unmistakable: bursts of automatic gunfire.

  “No,” I said out loud. No.

  I drove my legs like pistons into the ground, consumed by the need to catch Roldan and hold him back. If he got there before me, he’d be killed. If he got killed, I’d be lost, with no bargaining chips, in a hostile country.

  There was no trail. The scenery closed in. I tried to get a wider glance at the landscape and almost fell over the edge of a ravine. I caught myself on a tree limb, balancing precariously, hanging from a vine and cursing. The gunfire grew louder, sporadic bursts. A loud, high noise, a scream, not a siren.

  BrackenCorp. BrackenCorp. What else did I know about BrackenCorp? Where else had I heard the name?

  I shoved Roldan’s knife into my belt, grabbed the automatic from my waistband. I crashed through bushes, not trying to follow any path, traveling toward the sound. Yelling joined the bullet-hail. There was more screaming, more bullets, more yelling, a high-pitched noise I thought might be a woman wailing. The Beretta felt like a toy gun in my hand.

  I didn’t want to die in this place. The thought surprised me even as I had it; I’ve always been indifferent to the idea of death. Once I was dead, I’d figured, I wouldn’t care how it happened, so I was surprised at my reluctance to die surrounded by strange sights and smells. I didn’t want to die in a foreign land where I didn’t know the names of the trees.

  The firing hit a crescendo; it seemed that I had to be about to burst onto the battlefield, if I wasn’t on it already. Suddenly, with a whoosh, a helicopter took to the air not a football field away, and I flung myself flat on the ground.

  Dammit, I thought, where was an Uzi, an AK-47, something more suitable than this puny Beretta? To waltz into the clearing the helicopter had just left armed with nothing but the small Beretta and a lousy knife was suicide. But if anything happened to Roldan…

  Silence. It took a while to realize there was simply silence. It was disorienting, the silence. A void instead of a quiet. The birds had stopped singing; the insects ceased chattering. I lay on my stomach in the tall grass. There was no noise at all.

  I lifted my head, got to my knees. Abruptly, I recognized the terrain. There was the stream where the woman had washed her clothes. There was the rock she’d beaten them on. The rock was stained red. I crawled toward it, my eyes scanning the area for movement. There were lifeless bodies on the ground. One of the circular huts blazed, its roof on fire. I knelt, then stood frozen, the Beretta useless in my hand. I walked to a body, noted automatically that it was not an enemy soldier, but one of t
he guards who’d brought me to Roldan’s hut.

  I bent and snatched the rifle from his motionless hands. I stuck the small Beretta back in my waistband. AK-47, I thought. Cartridge clip. Bolt. Breech. My fingers found the pistol grip, the trigger.

  Had they taken Roldan away in the helicopter? Had they killed him? Where was everyone? Some of the campesinos surely must have run into the jungle when the helicopter came. Someone must be alive. Bodies littered the ground, lifeless as rag dolls, uniforms bleeding into the earth. The woman who’d been beating clothing against the rock was half-submerged in the stream, her head bloodied, motionless. Insects hummed inside my brain; I wondered whether the chopper was returning.

  No. I yanked myself out of the nightmare, counted the visible corpses. Most wore some version of camouflage gear. I wondered how they could tell each other apart, the attackers and the attacked.

  I thought they were all dead. Nothing moved, nothing.

  I saw him as I came out onto what must have been the town green, the center, the meeting place. Chickens pecked at the ground, unmoved by the disaster.

  Roldan. Roldan alive. He was bending over a body, and by the sweep of dark hair I knew it was Luisa Cabrera, and by the loose-limbed wrongness of her posture, I knew she was dead. He knelt; he seemed to be keening, swaying. His lips moved. He stroked her hair. Almost, it looked as if they were dancing.

  Behind him, movement. A corpse moved; a man in a grayish uniform stood, wavered, and straightened his arms, taking aim at Roldan’s unprotected back.

  I didn’t think. I fitted the rifle to my shoulder faster than thought, and pulled the trigger. The recoil almost drove me to the ground.

  The man went down. Roldan spun toward me, lifting his own weapon.

  I think I screamed, but I may have been screaming from the minute the soldier stood and took aim.

  Roldan must have recognized me; he didn’t shoot.

  CHAPTER 32

  When I was a cop we held emergency drills, playing out the aftermath of explosions, civil riots, chemical spills, and nuclear attacks. The exercises were meant to be taken seriously, but a mutilated “corpse” would occasionally giggle or sneeze; the practice sessions took no emotional toll. I’ve been among the first at gang shootings, fires, and fatal car crashes. Horrible as they were, they were always, to some extent, routine, because I was there in my capacity as a sworn officer. I had a job to do, a scene to secure, witnesses to locate or interview.

  The guerrilla camp in the aftermath of the chopper attack was an uncensored TV-news image of lopsided battle. It was worse than a train wreck. Roldan and I made the rounds together, counting the dead, closing their eyes. I stopped counting at seventeen. Why at seventeen? I remember wondering, but I don’t know why. It was as though some part of me shut down after that, decided that the disaster could not be quantified or understood. Other than Cabrera and the guards, I recognized no one. Roldan knew them all; he seemed to age before my eyes. His shoulders slumped. His eyes darkened.

  We did what we could for the wounded with emergency medical supplies buried under the corner of one of the huts. Roldan, a competent and merciful medic, used drugs from the supply chest as long as they held out. Then he rolled balls of coca leaves between his fingers and dispensed them to sufferers. Several times he shut his eyes and stayed motionless, his lips moving in prayer.

  “This one will need to go to the mamas,” he murmured as if talking to himself.

  The wounded American was gone, hammock and all, the heavy ropes that had supported his weight sliced cleanly, every trace of his existence obliterated. We found my backpack behind another hut, the lining slashed, and I assumed they’d retrieved their homing device.

  Every time I glimpsed a female body, I was afraid it was Paolina’s. There was no reason for my fear, but I’d passed beyond reason. Any cruelty seemed to be possible in this country; I was walking through a killing field.

  Stragglers returned from the jungle, twenty of them, thirty; I didn’t realize how many until I noticed that the fires were dying. A bucket brigade had formed, a raggedy line starting at the river where the dead woman had washed her clothes this morning. This morning, I decided, had been a month ago, a year ago. Someone handed me a sloshing bucket and I passed it robotically on, wondering how I’d gotten into the bucket brigade line in the first place. Grab and pass, grab and pass. There was comfort in the rhythm for a while.

  When the fires were out, the debris steaming, I glanced around for Roldan. He’d been beside me, but I wasn’t sure if it had been minutes ago or hours ago. I spat the soggy ball of leaves onto the ground, and asked the man beside me where El Martillo had gone. I rubbed my palms where the heavy buckets had chafed, but the incipient calluses didn’t matter any more than the pain in my feet did. The man pointed. Roldan was fifty yards away, at the center of a circle of gesticulating men. I joined the group, listening for some sort of explanation, as if there could have been any reasonable justification for the things I’d seen.

  More would have gone into hiding, a man insisted, but Luisa Cabrera said the invaders had come to negotiate. The chopper was landing, she’d told them. If they’d come to kill, they’d have done it from the air. Troops ran from the chopper, shooting; they wasted no effort in speech. If the invaders had fired before landing, more would have run, more would have believed the man who was now talking, the man Roldan called Flaco.

  I slipped between two older men, shoved closer to Roldan. He noticed me and made room.

  “Luisa still believed in words,” he said. “Even after what they did to her father.”

  “They came for the American,” I said. That much made sense: The American was living proof of foreign involvement.

  Flaco had dark skin and braided hair, a scratched and bloody arm. He glared at me before continuing, then glanced at Roldan, as though inquiring whether he could speak freely in my presence. Roldan nodded.

  “They took the American, yes,” he said, “but they wanted the gold, and they wanted you.” His nod indicated El Martillo. “I heard them yelling at Luisa. She said you’d gone away, that she didn’t know where you’d gone. They demanded the gold. She said it wasn’t here.”

  “Did they mention the girl?” I asked. “Was there a girl on the chopper?”

  “No.”

  Cabrera was dead, and the chopper that had zoomed into the sky was a twin of the one downed high on the mountain. I wondered whether they’d bomb the remains of the copter on the mountain into smithereens, how far they’d go to wipe out evidence of their incursion, how far they’d go to reclaim the gold. I noticed I was thinking of the enemy as they. I felt like I was turning into some conspiracy freak describing the New World Order, black helicopters and all.

  “What language did they speak?” I said. “Were they Colombians or gringos?”

  Flaco shrugged.

  “Are any attackers here? Any of the dead?”

  He nodded curtly and pointed to a body clad in fatigues newer than those worn by Roldan’s men.

  “He’s a child.” I kneeled at the side of the corpse.

  “The boy is all of seventeen,” Flaco said earnestly. “If he’d lived to be thirty he’d have thought himself an old man.”

  The dead boy wore a religious medallion on a chain, a knife strapped to his thigh. He’d caught seven or eight bullets; his torso was riddled with wounds, the back of his shirt all-over blood.

  “What are you doing?” Roldan, at my side, spoke softly.

  I was digging inside the boy’s pants pockets. “Who is he?” I said. “Who are they?”

  He had money in his pocket. Pesos, but also U.S. quarters, dimes, and pennies. One dollar and fifty-seven cents. Flaco and Roldan scrutinized the uniform, the medallion, and the knife before pronouncing him a para, a member of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the AUC.

  “They call themselves anti-Communist. They work for the army, for rich landowners, drug dealers, for whoever pays them,” Flaco said.

  They worked w
ith an American who carried ID from an outfit named BrackenCorp. They crashed the copter on the mountain. They snatched the man in the hut.

  Flaco said, “There’s another one, here.”

  He, too, was a young Colombian para. It made sense; they wouldn’t want to risk American dead. For this raid, they’d risked only Colombians. I bit my lip and paced, recalling the man in the hut, his long hair, his beard, his tattoo.

  “Roldan,” I said, “the helicopter on the mountaintop, you said it was part of a defoliation flight. Don’t they use crop-spraying planes?”

  “The U.S. defoliation flights use planes, but they’re often escorted by helicopters, especially in the south, because guerrilla groups have attacked the planes.”

  I said, “I don’t think this involves the regular army.”

  “Special Forces, then.”

  I shook my head. Even Special Forces wore dog tags; the American military is particular about identifying their dead. Then there was the tattoo, the black arrow piercing the blue triangle, the same design I’d seen on the mountaintop, the corporate logo on the BrackenCorp ID. And I knew what I’d read in the news: The U.S. Army had gotten lean and mean. Troops were tied down in Afghanistan, in Iraq, recruitment was down.

  Corporate names were coming to the fore, supplying so-called “logistical support”: Halliburton and KBR, Blackwater, independent contractors who worked for the pared-down army, corporate giants with rules all their own. Possibly with agendas of their own.

  “BrackenCorp,” I said. “Roldan, that’s our lead. If we find BrackenCorp, we can find Paolina.”

  “There’s no guarantee she’s alive.”

  “Your man on the mountaintop saw her in the dream world.”

  “You’re grabbing at straws.”

  They were all I had left.

  I said, “The Kogi on the mountaintop, they saved your life. So you owed them, right? You became the caretaker?”