by John Moore
We boarded the ship as the sun’s light, not two hours old, bathed us. Carlos had all of the gear loaded, so we shoved off immediately. The winds were calm and the seas were flat. The still waters reflecting the morning sun reminded me of the photos on post cards. So serene and inviting. The ocean air was fresh, slightly smelling of salt. Gulls streaked through the sky surveying the crystal clear water for breakfast. I felt a warmth deep inside me knowing I was communing with the earth. I reveled in the moment.
Soon we were underway speeding to our destination. My hair blew from my eyes as the boat sped along. The ship’s GPS led us right to the coordinates written on the paper from Sarah’s safety deposit box. Three hours later we arrived at the dive site. Tom and I suited up and went over our plans yet one more time. Carlos stayed on board. Tom and I splashed into the sea.
We descended slowly along a rope weighted at the bottom and attached to a buoy on the surface. We had no form of communication with Carlos on the surface and only hand signals between us. Hand signals Tom taught me and practiced till they we forever anchored in my subconscious mind. We each had a light and a spear gun. The water was crystal clear, and fish darted in and out of our path. We scanned the bottom with our lights and, bam, there it was. The barge was exactly where Sarah’s coordinates said it would be. There she lay on the ocean’s floor dimly illuminated but, clearly visible. She was intact, rusty brown barnacles attached to her skin. Brightly colored fished flashed by her motionless hull. My excitement made me kick harder to descend quicker toward the wreck. Tom reached over, grabbed my hand, and slowed me down.
We settled on top of the wreck and searched for the hatch of the holds. Tom found an open hold and signaled me to wait on the deck while he went inside. I looked around at all of the shell fish and other marine plant life attached to the ship and marveled at how the ocean claimed everything as its own, turning the barge into a life-supporting reef. Fish swam all about me doing their dance of life. Such color, such beauty. Why would anyone allow polluters to destroy this world? Tom emerged from the barge’s hold and handed me his sample kit, filled with samples. I gave him my kit as we’d planned and once again he disappeared. When he returned with the second kit full of samples he gave me the thumbs up, signaling success and our journey to the surface.
We had used most of our air but had enough to comfortably reach the surface. As we ascended, we saw another boat make a circle around our boat and speed off. Oh shit, I thought, I hope Carlos is OK. Tom grabbed my arm again to stop my climb to the surface. We could see what looked like fish heads and viscera sinking in the water. The current was making them drift in front of Carlos’ boat. Someone had chummed the water. Then from the depths a shark attacked the fish parts, and then another shark joined the fray. We froze. We waited below the sharks to let them feed and move on. The chum had been placed in the water to attract the sharks. Rogan’s thugs, I imagined. Luckily the current took the fish carcasses and the sharks away from Carlos’ boat. Not far away but at least not directly around the boat. We had only two minutes of air left. We had to surface, sharks or no sharks.
As Tom broke the surface beside the boat, a shark came from below us and tore at his leg. He dropped his light and spear gun and grabbed his blood-spurting thigh. The shark circled for a second attack. I didn’t hesitate. I don’t remember feeling fear, only gladness that I had a weapon and knew how to use it. I shot the shark with my spear gun not 10 feet from my wounded lover. The shark fell back. Then the fear hit – my heart nearly pounded out of my chest as I saw other sharks circling. Carlos pulled Tom into the boat and I quickly followed.
Tom’s leg was cut deeply. Blood seeped out of his wound, dripping on the deck of Carlos’ boat. Tom needed to get to a doctor soon. I pressed a towel against his wound to slow the bleeding, just like I’d done for Sophia. Carlos cranked the engine but shut it down quickly. I soon saw why. A man with an AK-47 stood on the bow of a fast-approaching larger ship. This can’t be good, I thought.
Chapter Twenty-Six:
Captured
As the boat drew closer I could see its markings. Armada Nacional. Tom lay in the bottom of the boat clearly in pain, blood dripping to the deck of the boat. He looked at me and said, “Hide your samples.”
I did as he said and placed them inside a hidden pouch in my buoyancy compensator. The men on the boat were dressed in military uniforms, and carried automatic weapons. I felt relieved that they were not pirates. They trained their guns on us as they tied to our boat. They spoke to Carlos in Spanish.
Carlos explained that we were on a pleasure dive trip and Tom had been attacked by a shark and needed medical attention immediately. They moved onto our boat slowly with no sense of urgency. They looked at Tom’s dive belt and saw the sample kit attached to it.
“Que es esto?” the man on our boat asked.
I didn’t understand so Carlos translated, “He wants to know what’s in the samples case.”
I explained that while diving we had come across a wreck on the bottom of the sea and took samples to see if we could determine how long it had been there. Carlos translated what I said for the men and they just stared at me.
“Tell them we need to get Tom to a doctor now,” I shouted.
“Keep calm,” Carlos said. But it was too late. Two other men got on our boat with a cellophane wrapped package that they put under the towel on the deck of our boat. He then slowly removed the towel as the other man snapped photos with a Nikon camera. All of the other men on the ship looked out to sea, intentionally averting their eyes, as the drama unfolded.
As the man pulled back the towel, he said in English, “Look what we have here: cocaine. We’ve caught smugglers.”
Tom looked at me and said, “Don’t fight it, Alexandra. There’s nothing we can do at this moment.”
The men turned out to be members of the Colombian Coast Guard. They wrapped Tom’s leg with a tight bandage to slow the bleeding and handcuffed us all. One of the men guided Tom and me onto their ship and winked at me as he sat us next to each other. It wasn’t a flirtatious wink. Still I couldn’t figure out what it meant. On the way to shore, Tom whispered in my ear that the Colombian Coast Guard, like all the Colombian law enforcement agencies, was infiltrated by cartel members. He believed we would be held for ransom since we were Americans. I could hear the pain in his voice and struggled to hold it together. We needed to get Tom to a doctor as soon as possible.
We arrived on shore, and they took Tom away. I hoped and prayed they were taking him to a hospital. They transferred me to a beat-up police van, paint peeling and dents all around, and drove me to the Barranquilla jail. They put me in a cell by myself which reminded me of a jail I’d seen in dozens of old western movies. The building was made of cinder blocks covered in white stucco, and the cell had an open toilet and cinder block benches. There was a set of bunk beds, with mattresses as thin as tortillas to accommodate two prisoners. It was dirty and it stunk of urine, decaying rats, and mold. But at least I was in the cell by myself.
I couldn’t understand what the officers were saying and my resolve to be strong was wavering. A man trying to kill me was one thing – but what if these corrupt bastards locked me up for years, could I survive without losing my mind if they clung to their story that I was a drug smuggler and just threw away the key? Could I stay strong through that?
Don’t think about it, Alexandra, I said to myself. There’s no way that will happen.
No way is a little strong, I said back to myself, then put my hands over my eyes and tried to force my thoughts to stop.
After what seemed like an hours but was probably fifteen minutes, one of the men came back and took me out of the cell to an interrogation room. It was barely larger than my cell and smelled of cigarettes rather than human waste. The light was harsh. He questioned me about our trip wanting to know why we were diving in that particular area. Oddly enough, he didn’t ask me anything about the cocaine they claimed t
o have found on Carlos’ boat. My interrogator grew frustrated with my answers and placed me back in my cell. Shortly after my interrogation, they placed a rather large woman, with pit marks on her face and knife scars on her neck, exposed by her long sleeved blue work shirt in the cell with me.
She looked at me with disdain and said, “Puta, what are you doing in our country?”
“Just a tourist enjoying the food and friendly atmosphere,” I said.
She rolled up her sleeves and there in plain sight was a scorpion tattoo. She was a member of the same cartel as the Serpent. Without muttering another word she lunged toward me, wrapping her hands around my throat strangling me. No you don’t, bitch, I thought. I knocked her hands away in ninja warrior fashion and slugged her right in the jaw with my trusty left hook. Before she could react, I followed with a roundhouse right. She went down, dropped like a hay bale thrown from our barn loft back home.
“I am tired of people fucking with me and my friends,” I said. “You want trouble, you’ve got trouble.”
She tried to get up. I thought about Sarah checking her swing instead of hitting Mark Stevens with her bat. Not this time, I thought, and I kicked her in the head, knocking her out cold, blood and spittle flying from her mouth. The jailers watching the fight rushed in and restrained me. They dragged the tattooed woman out of the cell and locked me in. My chest heaved. My fists were still clenched and my face was cherry red. I stood squared off waiting for the next one to come in and attack me. I heard the guards talking about transferring me to a prison inland, close to Bogota. Why Bogota, I wondered? What the hell were they going to do to me there? I had to get out of this jail.
I yelled at the guards, “I want to call the United States Embassy. I am an American; you can’t keep me here without a reason.”
They ignored me for a while and then one the guards, a short greasy haired man whose belly hung over his belt walked to my cell. He glared at me, shook his nightstick at me and in broken English said, “Shut up, puta, or I’ll ram this stick up your ass. You’d probably like that, right puta?”
I paced from the front to the back of the cell and over and over again. Think, Alexandra, think. Screaming wasn’t going to help me. Somehow I needed to get a message to the embassy. But how was I going to pull that off? I was stuck with no one to help me. Where was Tom? Did they take him to a hospital? I worried that he was buried in a shallow grave with some other cartel victims. I lie on the dirty bottom bunk and put face in my hands, gnats floating around my head. I didn’t cry. I thought, how can I get the fuck out of here?
After I’d been in the cell for a few more hours, the guard said I had a visitor. In walked a long-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful 30- something with a low-cut ruffled blouse. The guard placed a stool in front of my cell for her to sit on, all the while focused on her boobs. She smiled at him and thanked him in a tiny voice. He left us to talk.
“Hi, Alexandra, I’m Carmen, Carlos’ sister. I don’t know how long they are going to let me talk to you. I had to bribe them to get in here. Carlos is in the men’s part of this jail and Tom is at the hospital. He is in a section reserved for prisoners. I don’t know how he is doing. I am sorry to tell you that sometimes here in Colombia they don’t take good care of prisoners in these hospitals. Carlos talked to some of his friends and had them bribe the guards at the marina to let us take the dive equipment off the boat. They retrieved your buoyancy compensator and the samples hidden inside.”
“They did? That is fantastic news,” I said.
“No, Alexandra, it’s not,” Carmen said. “There’re no traces of any chemicals in the samples. No Agent Orange, dioxins or even glyphosate. The barge wasn’t carrying those pesticides or any other chemicals.”
“There must be some kind of mistake,” I said.
“So sorry, Alexandra, no mistake. Our lab is sure that if the barge had any of those chemicals in it at the time it sunk, they would have detected them. There were none. Carlos told me about the cocaine. We will have to pay money to get the charges dropped. If Tom recovers, we might be able to get him too. But if the cartel wants him dead, there will be nothing any of us can do to stop it. For some reason, they want to take you to a prison deeper inside Colombia. That can only mean they are turning you over to the scorpion cartel. But I don’t know why.”
“Bart Rogan,” I said. “It’s all his doing. If they get me there they’ll kill me and my body will never be found. What can we do?”
She began to cry, “I don’t know, Alexandra. They are too powerful to fight. We live every day in fear that these scorpions will kidnap us and make us work for the cartel. The police let them do anything they want. Sometimes if people resist they cut off their heads and hang them on the fences along the road. I can’t do anything to help you. If I do, they will kill my family.”
“Time’s up,” the guard said and dragged her out of the room.
There went my last hope. As I sat in the cell, I worried about Tom. He was a fighter but now that he was injured, how could he protect himself? What would they do to him? What were their plans for me? It was clear to me that Rogan was behind all our problems. He used his connection with the cartels to bribe two of the Colombian Coast Guard Members to plant cocaine on our boat. The others looked the other way for fear of what might happen to them or their families. I refused to be bought so he needed me to disappear, and I played right into his hands. But there must be some reason he hadn’t killed me yet. He must want something from me. I was at his mercy now. These are his people. I was trapped.
As night fell, I wracked my brain to think of an escape plan, running through all the movies and TV shows I’d ever seen. Bribe a guard? Escape in the dirty laundry? The bars were solid. I didn’t know where I was exactly. I didn’t speak the language and I had no money. I lay in the bed with my eyes open. Sleeping was out of the question. Would they send another cartel member in the cell to cut my throat here in Barranquilla? Or, would they kill me on the road to the central part of Colombia? Either way, I resolved that I wasn’t going without a fight.
Every hour I got out of bed and paced my cell to show I wasn’t asleep and an easy victim. As I paced I heard the prison sounds marring the night. Officers laughing at jokes. Drunks thrown in jail to sleep it off. Women screaming at their husbands for being arrested. Miscellaneous grunts and groans. Human suffering in a place where no one cared.
I struggled to stay awake, to fight the night. I imagined the sun rising in the sky. It was a beautiful sight in my mind. Even though I might be with my mom and Sarah by the end of the day, it was a beautiful day to be alive. Maybe I was delirious. The guard brought me two plain tortillas for breakfast and a cup of water. No coffee this morning. What did it matter anyway? It was my waking dream, not reality. The night was still crawling by conspiring with my fatigue to make me sleep. God, I could use a cup of coffee. The hours passed slowly, as they do when you are waiting in a dentist’s outer office for a root canal.
Finally, night blended into the next morning. I wasn’t able to discern a difference other than the dim light that made its way from a window down the hall to my cell. I was exhausted but happy I’d made it through the night. Morning sounds and smells filled the air. I could hear new guards arriving and others leaving. Coffee smells from the guards’ stations. What would I give for a cup of the rich Colombian coffee? Fat chance, I thought. Another tortilla was shoved through a small square opening in the bars into my cell along with a cup of water. I consumed both without hesitation, fearing they would be taken away.
A man of small stature and rather surly demeanor walked down the hall connecting the cells and stopped abruptly in front of mine. I moved to the rear of the cell to put a comfortable distance between us. He stared at me for a while and cursed in broken English.
“Puta,” he said. “You will be leaving us this morning. Maybe you want to stay. Maybe you pay money to stay.”
Another larger man
flew down the hallway and knocked the smaller man to the ground, nearly taking his head off. The larger man cursed in Spanish, no doubt disparaging the smaller man’s lineage.
Glancing at me, he said in English, “She doesn’t belong to you. She belongs to El Alacran. Do not touch her. You’ll get us all killed.”
The smaller man quickly got off the floor and scrambled down the hallway saying, “Lo seiento, lo siento” as he trotted away. His tone of voice and body language conveyed his apology and fear. The large man told me soon I would be leaving to go to Bogota.
Who the hell is El Alacran? I belong to him? What does that mean? Why are they taking me to Bogota? If they wanted to charge me with smuggling, I should stay here – or I should if any of this was legitimate. But, of course, I knew it wasn’t. They had something horrible planned for me and I was helpless to stop them. And, Tom. What did they do with Tom? Did they jerk him from the hospital, throw him in a cell, and let him bleed to death? Poor Tom. I was so sorry I got him into this mess.
I could hear men arguing among themselves mentioning my name a time or two but couldn’t discern the source of the conflict. The argument continued for at least an hour back and forth, fists slamming on, screaming, and cursing. After a while, it became clear to me what they were yelling about. They were haggling over money. Money to buy me. I was being sold and they were haggling over the price. Finally, the yelling stopped. A guard brought two men with scorpion tattoos and AK-47s to my cell door. When the door was unlocked, the guard put handcuffs on my wrists and handed me over to the tatted-up men. I might as well have been a cow sold at auction. The scorpions pushed me out of the cell to take me to whatever fate they had planned for me. I could do nothing but go.
The guard looked at me with disdain. He had a sickening smile on his face and a sarcastic tone in his voice and said, “Now, American puta, you go to meet El Alacran.”
