If We Survive

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

You say you are tourists trying to get back to America?”

The choppers still hovered directly over us. The man had to shout to make himself heard.

He told us his name was Lieutenant Franco. He was a slick piece of work. A rotund man around thirty-five or so. He was wearing fatigues topped with a jaunty green beret pulled to one side on his pitch-black hair. He had a round face with small eyes—looked sort of like a mean elementary-school teacher. His attitude was arrogant and distant, as if he were looking down at us from a great height.

He was wearing a pistol on his hip, but he didn’t pull it on us. Well, he didn’t have to. He had ten men surrounding us, their machine guns leveled.

“We’ve got no quarrel with anyone,” Palmer said to him. “We just want to go home.”

Lieutenant Franco drew his thumb slowly across his lower lip. He studied each one of us, his eyes lingering a little on the girls. I held my breath. I couldn’t even hope he would believe us—just give us a lift to the airport and let us go back to the US. Nothing could ever be that easy in this country.

After a few moments, the lieutenant straightened. “I am under orders from President Cobar and the revolutionary council to bring all foreigners in for questioning,” he said. Even over the chopper noise, I could hear he spoke excellent English with only a slight accent. “You will be taken to the Central Prison until the council has decided what is to be done with you.”

Suddenly Jim spoke up, raising his voice boldly. “I would like to see President Cobar. If I could just speak to him for a moment, I believe I could make him understand…”

But Lieutenant Franco was no longer listening. He turned his back on Jim and shouted orders to his soldiers in Spanish, gesturing our way.

I felt a hand on my arm and glanced down to see Palmer gripping me. At first I didn’t know why, but in the next moment I understood.

Because in the next moment Nicki cried out. The soldiers had surrounded her and grabbed her by both arms. They grabbed Meredith too and started hauling the two girls toward one of the trucks. I realized with dread: they were going to separate us, girls from boys. My whole body tensed with the instinct to try to stop them, but Palmer’s hand on my arm kept me from reacting… which probably also kept me from getting shot on the spot.

They hoisted the girls into the back of one pickup. Three soldiers got in with them as two more got into the cab. The soldiers in back with the girls were leering and grinning and making remarks to the other soldiers, the ones who were left behind with us. The looks on their faces made my heart turn black with fear and anger.

But now Jim and Palmer and I were shoved toward the other truck and forced to climb up into the bed. Three soldiers got in with us as well, two in the cab. We were shoved down to the truck bed and sat with our backs against the wall.

“Will the girls be all right?” I asked Palmer.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I saw the answer in his eyes. It was a look I hadn’t seen there before— or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it. A cold, faraway look. The look of a killer. No, not a killer. A warrior. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t vengeful. He was just willing—willing to do whatever he had to do…

But that didn’t make me feel any better about the girls.

The girls’ truck started off and ours started right after it, bounding down the slope over the rough dirt road.

I sat in silence. The green valleys fell away. The road turned and became smoother: it wasn’t dirt anymore, I guess. We had joined the highway into the city. The trucks sped up. We traveled quickly.

Houses began to appear. Small huts on the edge of fields, then clusters of shabby, dilapidated homes, then even more dilapidated apartment towers with lines of laundry hanging from their balconies. The city sort of grew up around us.

Soon we were going down dark, narrow streets lined with four-story apartment buildings. The buildings were painted bright colors—yellow and pink and light blue—as if they had been built to be cheerful places. But the paint was so scarred and the structures themselves were so broken and slanted that some of them looked like they might tip over and crumble to dust at any minute.

Now and then, in the distance, I heard machine-gun fire. Not far away either. Maybe the rebels were still fighting the soldiers in some parts of the city, I thought. Or maybe they were executing people they didn’t like. I didn’t ask. I didn’t really want to know.

Now we turned a corner onto a broad avenue. It was a part of the city I’d never seen before. The worst part, I thought. There were pine trees growing up on either side of the road, but under the trees, there were piles of garbage. Amid the garbage, I saw rows of sheds—shanties with walls of wood and roofs of corrugated tin. On some of them, the fourth side was open to the weather—no wall but a blanket that could be pulled off the roof and used for a curtain. I could see women with their children sitting inside the sheds, sometimes men too. It seemed unbelievable that anyone was actually living in this sort of poverty in the middle of the capital, but there were a lot of them, one shed after another, one family after another.

I had risen to my knees in the truck bed by this time in order to get a better view. Holding on to the bed wall, I leaned out and looked up ahead down the road.

At the end of the avenue stood the prison.

Two large gates rose, framed by guard towers on either side. At the top of the towers were enclosures with glass walls, men with guns standing watch inside. As our trucks approached, the gates swung open. We passed beneath the towers—beneath the guns—into an open courtyard surrounded by white walls with barbed wire on top. On the other side of the courtyard was a large stone building, grimy tan. The sight of it sent a fresh spurt of fear through me. It might have been any government building, an office building or something. But I took one look at the place and knew somehow that horrible things happened in there and that a lot of the people who entered never came out.

The girls’ truck reached the front of the building first, then ours pulled up behind it. I watched as the rebel gunmen hustled Meredith and Nicki off the truck bed and marched them inside. I caught a glimpse of Nicki’s face. She was pale and there were tears glistening on her cheeks. But she was quiet, her lips pressed tight together now as if she were trying to keep herself from losing control and screaming. As for Meredith—well, as always, her back was very straight, her face very still, her eyes very clear. Fearless, Palmer had called her—and that’s how she looked: fearless.

Palmer had asked her what had happened to make her like that, to make her fearless. In that moment, I wondered the same thing myself, because I was definitely not fearless. I was full of fear—for myself, yes, but especially for the girls.

The girls were taken inside, and the soldiers brought me and Jim and Palmer off the trucks and marched us into the building after them.

Everything moved very quickly then. They rushed us through a security checkpoint crowded with guards. Past gates, down empty halls. I tried to keep track of where the girls were being taken. But I also kept seeing things that claimed my attention and inflamed my terror. I saw men with brutal faces toting guns and clubs. I saw people lying on hallway floors, unconscious—one in a pool of blood. I saw a woman with two children clinging to her skirts. The woman was screaming and crying and holding out her hands in supplication to one of the gunmen—who ignored her. I felt like scenes from a horror movie were flashing in front of me. Only it wasn’t a movie. It was real.

We were taken down a flight of stairs into a cellar with rough stone walls. There were bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. There were small patches of glare beneath the bulbs, then long passages of darkness. The girls went down a corridor to the left, and I had to bite my lip to keep from shouting out as I lost sight of them. Palmer and Jim and I were hustled along—under another bulb, through more darkness. Then I saw a thick metal door with a sliding steel panel in it.

The door opened and we were shoved through. We were in a stone cell lit by the glare of a single bare bulb.

Jim staggered against the wall as he was thrown in. “I demand to see President Cobar,” he shouted. “He’ll want to hear what I have to tell him.”

The guard slammed the heavy door shut. We heard the bolt shoot home.

Did I say I was full of fear before? I guess that wasn’t quite true—I couldn’t have been totally full because when I saw this place, my fear rose.

It was a dungeon. I mean, really. Like something out of a movie about knights in armor. All that was missing was a bearded prisoner chained to the wall. It was just an empty room of rough stone. Just stone walls and the iron door and the bare bulb. Nothing else. Oh, wait—there were also two buckets in a corner. One of the buckets was filled with water.

My eyes passed over the place. Came to rest on the two buckets. I stood there staring at them stupidly.

“One’s the sink, one’s the toilet,” Palmer told me.

“Uch,” I said.

“I asked for the room with cable TV, but they were booked up.”

I tried to laugh, but I was too heavy inside to work up the energy.

“This is madness,” Jim said, pacing angrily. “It’s insanity. We tell them we’re innocent tourists and they put us in here? If they would just let me talk to President Cobar for five minutes… If they would just let me talk to somebody.”

Yeah, that’s sure to help, I thought. But I turned to Palmer. He had moved to one wall—the wall across from the door. He put his back against it and slid down and sat on the floor, one knee lifted, one arm draped over his knee. He looked relaxed. Or, that is, his body looked relaxed. And he was still wearing that small, mocking half smile.

But the warrior look in his eyes hadn’t changed at all. He kept those eyes trained on the door.

“What do you think they’re gonna do now?” I asked him.

He glanced up at me as if he had forgotten I was there. He shook his head—he didn’t know the answer. He looked at the door again.

“They took over the city fast,” he said. “Very fast. They have the prison. Helicopters. The army must’ve run for it— or joined them. Cobar must’ve had this well planned. He must have had a lot of support from within the government.”

“I heard shooting in the city as we were coming in,” I said. “I thought maybe there was still some resistance.”

But Palmer shook his head again. “That wasn’t battle. Those were executions. It’s a different sound.”

“That’s not good,” I said, licking my dry lips. “Executions.”

“No,” said Palmer. “It’s not.”

“They’re not just going to execute us,” said Jim, pacing back and forth. “Why would they execute us? It’s like we told them: we’re tourists. We just want to go home.”

Anger flared in me. “They don’t need a reason!” I nearly shouted at him. He was really starting to get on my nerves. How could somebody be so blind to what was right in front of him? “They almost executed us once already, Jim. We were just as innocent then.”

“Ach.” Jim waved off the idea. “That was Mendoza—a provincial idiot. Fernandez Cobar’s a sophisticated man…”

“Right,” I said bitterly. “He wrote a book. Maybe he’ll beat us to death with it and save bullets!”

Jim went on pacing. I turned my back on him.

“You think they believe us about being tourists?” I asked Palmer nervously. “You think they’ll eventually let us go or… ?”

Palmer lifted his eyes to mine, and if my heart could have sunk any lower, it would have.

“They’ve got the city, they’ve got the army, they’ve got the country,” Palmer said. “There’s nothing to stand in their way. They can pretty much do what they want now. And there are a lot of people who’ll cheer them for executing Americans.”

“Well, yeah,” Jim muttered—as if he thought executing Americans sounded like a great idea, as if he thought they could execute Americans without bothering him at all.

I shook my head. “I don’t see how this can get any worse,” I said.

And the moment I said that, we heard the bolt slide back. The dungeon door swung open.

And Mendoza walked in.