Standoff

Fourteen

The trip north, back to the Gap, was long and uneventful, except for a brief moment when the engines were set to idle and we drifted with the current. Perez got up, stretched and then shot two of the bodyguards, the men working security on the bar’s front door. Perez stretched again. One of the men rolled into the water of his own accord, pulled by gravity, and sank. The other slumped where he sat, severely wounded. Perez gripped the overhead bar and started kicking him in the head. The man slumped sideways, his head on the seat, and then Perez really went to work, stomping on it again and again and again. He just kept stomping. The man was dead several times over. Somehow I had the impression that the show was for my benefit. No one said anything, but I assumed this was punishment for allowing me and my FARC friends uncontested access to the veranda. Perez finally pushed the bloody mess overboard, took out a handkerchief, wiped his hands and shoes on it, and also tossed it over the side. While he wiped, his head was angled in my direction. No smile, no frown. I assumed he was giving me the death stare, his eyes hidden behind Ray-Ban sunglasses, the seventies retro ones with large square frames.

The remaining bodyguards seemed not to notice any of this, like it was standard operating procedure, and just went on with whatever they were doing, which was to watch the world float by. Wouldn’t they be thinking that next time it could be them rolled into the river? I was. I assumed that was the point.

Eventually, one of the men produced a black bag and placed it over my head. My hands were also pulled behind my back and cuff-locked. The bag was reassuring. They’d hardly bother if I was gonna follow the other two into the drink, right?

The boat changed direction several times, and the salt smell of the sea was replaced by the damp decay of the jungle. Around an hour later, sweat streaming down my face, the bag came off. It had to be well after midnight. Up ahead, movement. We pulled up to a floating pontoon where a couple of armed men wearing US Army BDUs and night vision goggles stood watch. They came to attention and saluted Perez as the boat drifted near and tied us up while the boss disembarked. He had a quiet word to one of these men, who immediately shoved an AK in my face. “Turn around,” the man ordered in Spanish. I did as I was told.

In English, Perez said, “Before your apprenticeship starts, first we must examine your credentials.”

“Be my guest,” I said.

“If you have lied, I will cut you and the pain you will endure will far exceed any pain you have felt before.”

Arlen’s briefing about what it was like to be flayed came to mind and I swallowed involuntarily. I knew my bona fides would be checked sooner or later, but that didn’t make me any less nervous. Through Juan de Jesús, the Saint of Medellín, the cartel would have access to reliable news sources at El Diario. And then there were all the people supposedly on the take in El Paso. The barest hint that I wasn’t a genuine fugitive from justice, a killer who’d crossed to the dark side, and things would get ugly in a hurry.

The sentry accompanied me through what appeared to be a military-style, semi-permanent forward operating base crawling with armed guards and dogs, to a cluster of portable buildings set in a clearing hacked out of the jungle. The buildings were all draped in camouflage netting and painted with what I guessed was probably some kind of infrared-defeating coating. The sentry unlocked the door with the key, motioned me inside, and turned on a red light set on the wall beside the door. The smell of the place reminded me of the docks back at Turbo. The centerpiece was a floor-to-ceiling welded steel cage, a massive padlock securing the door. There was a bucket inside the cage, which accounted for some of the smell. On the floor outside the cage, a plastic-wrapped bundle of bottled water.

With my face up against the cage, the jailer patted me down and this time the DEET was confiscated, no ifs or buts. Then he shoved me into the cage and tossed a couple of bottles of water in behind me, pulled a knife and stuck the blade through the bars at waist height. I turned and offered my hands and he sawed through the cuff locks. That was something, at least. He departed, pulling the door shut behind him. The air hummed with mosquitoes.

Great.

There wasn’t much to do except sit in a corner, pull my collar up around my ears, close my eyes and hope that whoever said things always looked brighter in the morning wasn’t just making shit up.

He or she was making shit up. The sun rose an eternity later and turned the prison into a steam room. Midges flew in under the eaves and finished what the mosquitoes left behind. The bucket was full and the water bottles were empty. “Hey!” I called out. “HEY!”

The door opened almost immediately. Maybe I should have complained earlier. An armed man came in, a different guy to the one who’d put me in the cage. He cracked the lock, opened the door and pointed at the water bottles. I took one, opened it, poured water over my head and grabbed a second for drinking. Standing at the doorway, the guard grunted, wanting me to follow.

Out in the bright sunshine, I could confirm that this was indeed a military-style FOB, but with a few interesting differences. Most of the people, all of whom were dressed in jungle camouflage, were getting around on dirt bikes. There was also a runway obscured from above by netting and moveable floats sprouting vegetation. It was a reasonably long strip — over two thousand feet was my initial guess — long enough for medium-size, multi-engine aircraft. Off to one side of the runway, hidden under netting, were a couple of large hangars and several smaller ones. A platoon of armed men in BDUs jogged past, sounding out some unfamiliar verse in Spanish, interrupting my low-level snooping. They ran toward the jungle, all in step. Where the bush seemed impenetrable, the troop stopped and peeled back a mass of camouflage netting, revealing two lines of Yamaha dirt bikes. The men hopped on the machines, kicked them over and then roared off to tackle an obstacle course.

Another grunt from the guard told me to catch up. He led the way to a portable building not unlike the one that housed the cage. The guard knocked on the door and opened it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go inside but the options for exercising free will were limited. I walked in. Perez was sitting behind a desk, a laptop in front of him. He waved me at the chair on the opposite side of the desk. The guard left, closing the door as I sat.

Perez opened a drawer, pulled out a pistol and aimed it at me. I flinched, which he seemed to enjoy, his features assuming their imitation smile, and then he let the weapon swing down, his finger in the trigger guard so that the handle faced me. It was my Sig. Reaching forward, I took it. Perez placed the spare magazines on the desk, the ones confiscated, along with my cell and wallet. I figured my status as a cop killer had checked out.

“How about the mosquito repellent?” I asked him.

He frowned, hesitated, then went back into his drawer and the bottle of DEET was placed on the desk beside the magazines. He seemed reluctant to hand it back. Maybe weapons were easy to come by here but relief from flying insects not so much. “Okay,” I said, feeling reassured. So far, so good. I looked over the Sig, finding a round in the chamber and the magazine fully loaded, just as I’d last seen it. I leaned forward to re-holster the weapon in the small of my back. “Does this mean I’m in?” I asked.

“You make a delivery,” Perez said.

Hmm, that didn’t answer my question, but at least that knife of his was still in its scabbard. He stood up and stared at me a moment. I couldn’t help but notice that there was no light in those eyes, no reflection, no humanity. They were the eyes of a living corpse, if such a thing were possible; gateways straight to hell.

I stood too, towering over him, and then as he walked past I fell in behind him, shortening my stride. Outside, over the last five minutes, activity had ramped up some. Around fifty men were clearing the runway, rolling the camouflage to one side, and the doors of the larger hangar had been pushed back. Guarding the skies were a couple of sport utility vehicles with .50 anti-aircraft guns mounted in their trays. Only one was manned by a young woman, dressed in BDUs. She yawned and flicked a cigarette butt onto the ground.

A small tractor towed an aircraft from the deep shadow within the hangar. My heart rate spiked when the aircraft it was towing revealed itself in the sunshine — a King Air, painted buzzard black. I pictured Bobby Macey, the sole survivor at the Horizon Airport massacre, burned raw by the desert sun, lying in a hospital bed with her raised broken leg. And that made me recall the sight of Gail Sorwick sprawled under a tent on the apron with her dead husband and kids around her, the cuts in her back and CSI’s breakdown of her final moments.

The King Air was heading for the threshold where half a dozen men stood around, all of whom were dressed in non-military clothing and carried an assortment of small arms: AKs, H&K light machine guns and so forth.

“Wait,” Perez told me.

I stopped and he continued walking toward the gunmen. The men gathered around him and a hurried briefing ensued. Some of them looked over at me a couple of times during their chat like I was the topic of the discussion. Perez gestured me to join them so I wandered over.

“Your aprendizaje …” Perez growled. “It starts.”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“You help.”

He handed me a machete and walked off. I looked at the rusting blade, then over at the men. They all had them in long scabbards over their shoulders. Were we going somewhere to clear something? I had questions, mostly about my job description, “Help” being pretty open-ended, especially where these folks were concerned. I sensed asking for specifics wouldn’t lead to answers. In my hand, the machete’s wood grip was already slick with sweat.

The tractor arrived and did a one-eighty with the aircraft, bringing it around so that it pointed down the runway. One of the gunmen disengaged the tow bar connecting the plane’s undercarriage to the tractor, which then roared off back to the hangar.

“Gringo,” one of the gunmen snarled in Spanish, nodding at the aircraft’s open cargo door. His tattooed head was shaved and cratered with infected bites, possibly mosquito but maybe something nasty and tropical, something that laid eggs. Maybe that accounted for his mood. His name was Carlos.

I went over to the plane and climbed aboard. Inside, strapped to the floor beneath netting, were two pallets of what appeared to be plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine, maybe eight hundred pounds of the stuff, a barcode attached to each brick.

Most of the gunmen took seats along one side of the fuselage. I took a seat opposite. Up in the cockpit, a pilot was already at the controls, running through checks. A high-pitched whine shivered through the metal against my back. The propeller began to spin. It picked up speed fast and the aircraft quickly filled with jet turbine roar and kerosene fumes. Then the second engine went through its start routine.

The door slammed shut. We sat there for a minute or two, the heat and humidity in the close confines soaring while the pilot waited for the gauges to show the right numbers. And then he released the brakes, the engine note sharpened and the plane surged forward.

A minute or so of steep climbing later, we leveled off at around fifteen hundred feet and hooked several aggressive turns. We flew around like that for maybe ten minutes before the pilot set the aircraft up in a steep descent. Wherever we were going, it was local, somewhere in the Darién Gap. For all I knew, given the erratic flight path, we could have been no more than a few miles from Perez’s base.

The King Air’s propellers screamed a high-pitched snarl. The jungle filled the porthole opposite and I braced for impact, guts churning, but then the aircraft leveled out and the wheels kissed the dirt an instant later. The pilot hit the brakes, reversed propeller pitch for a full emergency stop, and the aircraft bucked and jumped on the uneven ground before suddenly pirouetting on its axis to eat up some energy and finally coming to a dusty stop. The pilot cut the engines and looked back at us with a grin. Asshole.

The door in the side of the plane opened and three armed men with dirty faces stuck their black-bearded heads in, grinned and jauntily said, “Hola, amigos!” The leader of our party, Carlos, the guy with the bites, likewise made some friendly noises, went up to them, shook a hand and climbed out. The rest of us followed. I heard some talk exchanged with our hosts about this being a quick turnaround job and were there any other folks around to help unload the cargo? One of our guys walked to the edge of the runway where the jungle began and took a piss. Seemed like a good idea. I followed, found a tree of my own and used the time to scope the place. I wondered where we were exactly. The jungle here was thick. It reminded me of the territory Marco and I had hacked through. The landing strip was short, surrounded by triple canopy, the tallest trees off either end towering green skyscrapers. The pilot hadn’t been showing off. Much.

A shed the size of a double garage was set down one end of the strip — the far end. The three young Fidel Castro lookalikes were joined by half a dozen more just like them who came from the shed toward us, two of them pushing a trolley. Our guys had taken the netting off the cargo in the King Air and were starting to stack the bricks closer to the cargo door. One of theirs picked up a brick and felt the weight. He seemed okay with it. And that’s when the shooting started. Carlos just started unloading on the people pushing the trolley. It was a signal and suddenly all our people were shooting.

A Castro clone, one of those who welcomed us, put his hands up, eyes wide and frightened, and started begging for his life. The response was a strike from a machete, a horizontal swing from behind that almost but not quite took his head off. It toppled to the side, hanging weirdly on his chest by tendons and tangled black beard, swinging back and forth, blood spurting in gouts from severed arteries in the neck as the body toppled slowly to one side and twitched.

The assault was over in seconds. My mouth was open in shock. Carlos was yelling at me. He wanted to know why I didn’t shoot. I looked around, distracted, in a daze. Blood was everywhere; on the ground, on the trolley and the bricks of cocaine stacked there, on the side of the plane, over the corpses and the living. Perez’s men were drenched in it. Two of them were high-fiving, high on murder. I looked into Carlos’ face. “¿Por qué?” I asked him — why? He spat on my shoes and just walked off like the reason was obvious. First corpse he reached he drew his machete and started hacking off an arm at the shoulder.

One of Carlos’ men strolled past, a dismembered leg in each hand. “Matan los nuestros, matamos los suyos.” He shrugged like he was carting luggage — they kill ours, we kill theirs. Maybe he thought I hadn’t understood and added, “Ojo por ojo” — an eye for an eye. Which eye? Was he meaning the pile of fly-blown decapitated bodies Marco and I had earlier stumbled across in the jungle? According to Marco they were cartel men, and they wore BDUs identical to the ones worn around here. Were they Perez’s men who’d been murdered? This was payback?

The corpses were hacked up where they lay. The place increasingly smelled of copper, shit and urine as the victims began to soak the earth with their fluids. I heard a man singing a little ditty as he hacked his way through a shoulder. Still in a state of shock, it took several long seconds to register that Carlos was again yelling at me, pointing at a corpse on the ground. A few more seconds passed before I realized that he me wanted to chop it up. I unsheathed the machete given to me, threw it into the jungle and then walked toward the aircraft. Carlos intercepted me halfway there, screaming abuse, spitting as he yelled, his face speckled with someone’s dried blood. He pushed me backward; pushed again; pushed a third time. I ducked low on push number three, unbalancing him, and drove my fist into his gut. While he was winded, I hooked a closed fist to the meat of his jaw. He spun around half a turn before his legs gave out and he hit the ground hard, out cold.

I heard the clack of an AK-47’s bolt and a flash suppressor was shoved in my face. The bloodshot eyes of the man on the other end of the weapon, the way they moved from me and then back to the unconscious Carlos, hunting for clues, told me he was uncertain about his next move. He could kill me and that might be a good thing, resulting in a reward, or it might be the wrong thing, in which case a different kind of reward would come down on his ass. I didn’t stand around waiting for the guy to make up his mind and merely brushed the muzzle to one side. And, like that, the tension vanished. The boss was merely down for the count, but otherwise uninjured. He could resolve the issues with me himself when he came around, right? Maybe the men were secretly pleased Carlos’ lights had been punched out. I knew I enjoyed it.

I sat in the King Air’s doorway while the men continued their grisly task, ferrying limbs and torsos to the edge of the runway, setting them down and then moving them, arranging them and then changing their minds like fussy homemakers. The parade made me nauseous. I wanted to get away from there but I was stuck so I tilted my head back, closed my eyes and tried to go someplace else.

When the task was complete, the men returned to the King Air, re-secured the drugs beneath the webbing, and climbed aboard with a groggy Carlos supported between two of them like a drunk at the end of a night out. They sat him in a seat and buckled him in. I went over, patted him down unopposed, removing two knives and, from the back of his pants, an old revolver. He came around as the propellers spun up, saw me sitting beside him. After several long seconds of processing, he leaned forward drunkenly and went for the revolver no longer in the back of his pants. He stopped when he felt my Sig pressed into his ribs. “Gringo coño,” he mumbled, still woozy — gringo cunt.

“Sticks and stones, pal,” I told him.

The King Air lifted off, climbing steeply, desperately, the undercarriage smacking through the uppermost leaves of the trees off the end of the threshold. Once clear of them, the pilot leveled out, pulled a tight one-eighty and made a low pass back over the runway. I turned around for a look out the porthole as the words “Matams a todos” flashed past down on the ground, spelled out in arms and legs — we kill you all. The men in the plane nodded and grinned and slapped each other on the back. These guys weren’t just killers, they were illiterate killers. They’d missed the ‘o’ in Matamos.