Trader of secrets

Chapter Forty-Seven

The operator answers one question for us. There are no other airports south of Playa del Carmen along the Mexican coast, nothing north of Belize. According to him, there are some small landing strips in the jungle, but he doesn’t recommend going near any of them except in the most dire emergency. He is sure that some of them are used to run drugs up from South and Central America-what he calls “the Coca Highway.”

“Wonderful! How about flying me over Coba?” I ask him.

“I could, I suppose,” he says. “But why would you want to go there? You can get much better pictures along the beaches. I can fly you over Tulum and you take some magnificent photos of the temple above the beach,” he tells me. “If we get lucky, you see porpoise, maybe a whale or two.”

“No, I want to see Coba,” I tell him. “I’m willing to pay.”

“How much?” He gets a glint in his eye. The eternal question.

His usual flight along the coast above the beaches is ninety-nine dollars for twenty-five minutes. He pulls out a flight chart of the area, and we look at it together. The question for me is whether the little bird with two of us on board has enough range to get to Coba and back. He says it does, but he can’t guarantee how much time we would have in the air over Coba once we get there.

“That looks like more than forty miles each way.” He takes out a pair of calipers and measures the distance. “Forty-three to be exact,” he says. “Eighty-six miles round-trip. That’s a lot. Even with extra fuel, I would not be able to give you more than ten minutes over the area.”

“That’s OK.”

“Figure two hours’ flying time. For that I would need at least five hundred dollars,” he says.

I whistle. “That’s pretty steep.”

“If I have motor problems above the beach, I can always land on the hard sand along the water. Over the jungle is another matter,” he says. “I am putting my airplane at risk. That’s the best I can do. Take it or leave it.”

“Will you take a credit card?”

“Visa?”

I nod.

“From an American bank?”

“Yes.”

“I can, but there will be a five percent service charge,” he says.

I agree to the terms before he raises the price even more.

He takes my credit card and hands it to the girl sitting in the office so that she can call and get the charges approved.

He goes to gas up the plane while I talk with Harry and Joselyn out by the car.

“You’re really gonna go up in that thing?” Harry is looking over the top of his sunglasses at the flimsy ultralight parked on the apron along the edge of the runway.

“I thought you were going,” I tell him.

“I might take a bullet for you, but I’m not going near that.”

“You think it’s safe?” says Joselyn.

“I don’t know. I’m told they leave divers behind in the ocean all the time down here. They forget to count heads,” I tell her.

“Let’s hope the pilot remembers you’re behind him,” says Harry.

“I won’t have to worry if Visa has cut us off,” I tell him. “Of course, we’ll be sleeping in the jungle and bathing in a cenote with the gators.”

Joselyn shivers and hands me her camera. “Don’t talk like that. Here. It isn’t the best, but it’ll work. Just point and shoot,” she says. “If you see anything that you think looks like the description in those notes, take some pictures.”

The tiny camera is only ten megapixels with a three power magnification on the lens, but Joselyn tells me that she can download the photos to her computer and doctor them from there. If we’re lucky, we might get enough detail to see what is happening on the ground.

Before I know it, the Mexican pilot is back with a receipt for me to sign and a thin plastic helmet that looks like it’s more for show than anything else. He hands me some cotton.

I look at him.

“For your ears,” he says. “It’s very loud.”

He is right. I feel as if I am strapped onto his back with a screaming lawn mower engine chasing me down the runway. The push propeller whips the air two feet behind me as the tricycle landing gears tries twice to leave the ground only to come back down hard, each time at an angle across the runway. It jars my lower back. On the third attempt, the front wheel lifts off followed by the other two, and we are airborne.

We climb slowly with the small engine straining behind me. The pilot noses into the onshore breeze coming in off the ocean. The feeling of being in the air with a flapping fabric wing overhead and nothing below me except my feet on a metal rung is not something I would recommend to the nervous flier.

For the first five minutes we follow the coast south as we gain altitude. The houses of Playa del Carmen and the rolling whitecaps piling up on the beaches below take on a miniature appearance as we climb. We clear the town to the south, and after a couple more minutes the pilot dips his right wing. We cross over the highway and head southwest out over the jungle.

He is right about one thing. The ground below us looks ominous if for any reason we have to put down. Except for the occasional blue cenotes and the dull gray marshland around them, the blanket of green beneath us is nearly unbroken. The only human habitations and signs of life appear to be along the highway. The few sparse roads leading into the interior of the jungle go no more than a few thousand feet before they dead-end. After that there is nothing but jungle for as far as I can see.

We fly for almost twenty minutes with nothing until I see a road that looks unpaved winding below us. Trekking its way through the bush, it goes a few miles and ends. What it is doing there I haven’t a clue. From this altitude, no more than maybe five or six hundred feet, there are no signs of life on or near the dirt track. I suppose small houses, concrete mud huts, could be tucked away under the trees along the edge of the road, but if they are I can’t see them.

We fly on farther another ten minutes when I see a paved road in the distance. The pilot leans his head back toward me and yells above the screaming engine: “ Es the Tulum-to-Coba highway.”

I nod. I wonder how far we are from Coba.

He pushes the little plane forward until it crosses the ribbon of pavement below us. I watch as our winged shadow follows the road west.

I begin scanning the green velvet jungle below, looking for anything that might qualify as a large facility with an antenna array. There is nothing, only a few bald areas where the jungle has been scraped clear for structures that are no longer there, mostly right along the highway. There are a few houses and ramshackle buildings, small settlements.

A few miles farther on I start to see them: the line of cellular towers reaching out into the distance casting their tall shadows over the top of the green canopy, what I remembered from my last trip along the two-lane highway from Coba.

“You see the lake in the distance?” he yells back at me. “That is Coba. We are almost there. I will do a flyover. You want to take some pictures?”

I nod. I have the little camera in my hand, but so far nothing to shoot.

He begins to descend a little. I tell him no, to maintain altitude. This way I can see farther into the distance, my eyes straining for any break in the jungle.

“You scared?” He glances back toward me.

“No.”

He notices that I am looking in a different direction. “What are you looking for?” He yells back. “Something special?”

“I’ll know when I see it,” I tell him. “Have you flown in this area before?” I ask.

“Not often. A few times,” he tells me. “People who do the digs on the ruins sometimes like to get pictures from the air. That way they know where to dig. You see over there?” He points off to the right. “Those little hills?”

“Yes.”

“They are not hills,” he says. “They are Mayan ruins under the jungle. Some perhaps temples or ball courts, maybe palaces. May have been there a thousand years. Covered over by the jungle.”

“When was the last time you flew here?”

He shakes his head a little. “I don’t know. Maybe three… four months. I don’t come here often.”

“I am looking for a place that is supposed to have a large antenna array. You know antennas, like television. Perhaps a big dish. Supposed to be a new facility of some kind here in the jungle.”

He looks back at me over his shoulder, squinting his eyes. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Tourist,” I tell him.

“That is no place for turistas, ” he tells me.

“You know where it is?”

He nods.

“Take me there.”

He shakes his head no.

“I just need to see where it is,” I tell him.

He points off to the northwest. As we approach the area over the archaeological park at Coba, he banks to the right and flies for a few seconds until we find ourselves back out over the highway. It crosses an intersection, another paved road going due north. “There are many cenotes there. There used to be a small village. The landowners, the people with homes, have all been driven out. It is the cartels,” he says. “They cleared the jungle and made a landing strip, put up a big metal building of some kind. And what you call plato, umm…” He makes a cup with the open extended fingers and the palm of his right hand. He turns it up toward the sky and holds the flight stick with his other hand.

“A satellite dish?”

He nods. “There are three of them. Very big. Bigger than any I have ever seen before. One of them is the size of a large building. It’s no television?” he says.

“No. We could fly just a little ways up that road,” I tell him, “then we could turn and go toward the coast if you like.”

He shakes his head. “If I had known what you were looking for, I would not come,” he says. “Why do you want to go there?”

“I was told about it by someone.”

“Who?”

“A man in Paris,” I tell him. “Do you have any idea what they’re doing there?” I ask.

“No. And I don’t want to find out. Last time I flew over it, it was by mistake. They shot at me from the ground. No small stuff,” he says. “No pistols or rifles. Machine guns spitting out bullets of fire.”

“Tracers?”

He nods.

“Antiaircraft fire.”

“ Jess. They hit my wing. Punched holes in the fabric. Almost set it on fire. I was lucky to escape. I had to dive down just above the trees. I will not go near there again,” he says.

“How far up the road?” I ask.

He shakes his head as he starts the turn toward the coast. “You crazy if you go there,” he says.

“How far?”

“Kilometers, maybe twenty, perhaps a little more. Like I say, they forced the people from their homes. There is nothing there now except the big metal building and what you call the antennas. I am told that no one drives up that road any longer unless they are bringing materials or supplies. A man I know went up there in his truck a few months ago. He never came back.”

“Why doesn’t your government do something?” I ask.

He just shakes his head. “I don’t ask,” he says. “Sometimes it is best not to know.”