The Geronimo Breach (17 page)

“I’m not willing to bet my life on your willpower. The gangs in this region kill people for fun. They kill each other. They kill my people. If you have a moment of weakness, they kill me, too. Sorry. You want to take this trip, you give me cigarettes. No arguments,” Carlos declared. “You can have them back when it’s safe,” Carlos promised.

“Fuck you,” Al said, but he handed Carlos the packet.

Carlos crumpled the box, then cleared a small indentation in the dirt, and threw the package in it, burying it underfoot. He stamped on the dirt for good measure.

“I thought you said I could have them back when it was safe,” Al whined.

“I lied.”

~

On the large flat panel display, Richard studied the GPS tracking data for the cook’s cell phone. They were stationary now, and had been for over an hour. Five and a half miles off the road, but it might as well have been a hundred. There was no way he could get his men close enough to do an intercept, especially since the road would now have cops moving in from every available district.

It wasn’t every Sunday morning that a single Panamanian police officer took down three gunmen in a wide-open shootout, so the rubbernecking factor would be huge. Richard would bet his salary there’d be dozens of officers at the site within the hour, if not more.

In any other area of the world he would have contrived a clandestine drop, landing a chopper nearby and executing a surgical recovery operation. The problem was he didn’t have many local resources to draw upon, and had to keep this particular situation under the radar. Had this been Iraq or Afghanistan he could have arranged for a gunship to fly in and vaporize everything for a quarter mile – problem solved. But this was a friendly nation during peace time, a nation which took a really dim view of aggressive behavior – they were still touchy at having been invaded by the U.S. over the Noriega thing.

So he’d have to be creative.

That was fine – he knew how to improvise. He just hated doing so, after decades of experience had drilled into him that the difference between success and failure was planning, which translated into superior execution. He didn’t have such a luxury this time around. And the stakes were too high to leave this open-ended any longer.

The chopper he’d used to fly his team into Darien was operated by a reliable long term Agency asset, so there was no question he could get this guy to do a little side mission. The problem was that as the cook moved further into the Darien area, it would become increasingly dangerous to even fly over it – the rebels in the region packed surface-to-air missiles as well as large caliber machine-guns, and would have no way of knowing that any aircraft overhead wasn’t targeting them. So the window of opportunity was rapidly closing.

He picked up his phone, having weighed all his options and made the difficult decision. It would be messy, but sometimes life was disorganized. That’s the way it was happening on this one.

A pro rolled with it.

And Richard was a consummate pro.

The sun beat down on the overhead canopy of vegetation, making for a humid and stifling afternoon. No wonder Carlos didn’t want to move until the worst of the noon blaze had faded. Just lying around immobile was difficult enough. There was no cooling breeze in the jungle, no relief from the ever-present blanket of moist heat that enveloped their resting place. Even the brief rainstorms did little to mitigate their discomfort, as within minutes of the cloudbursts ending, the moisture converted into steam from the sun’s blistering rays.

Ernesto dozed, lying against a fallen tree trunk now overrun with vines. Occasionally he swatted at his face, in a losing battle with the gnats and mosquitoes. Carlos stood by the burros, checking the packs and comforting the animals, murmuring in their ears in a native dialect.

Al spent much of the time in the clearing on the periphery, crouched with his pants down, struggling to expel the prior night’s impromptu feast. It felt like someone had rubbed cayenne pepper on his rectum, and was kicking him in the lower stomach every few minutes. He suffered a constant cramping pain, punctuated by brief periods of squirting out what felt like battery acid sprinkled with small chunks of internal organs. What madness had compelled him to sample the local fare? He blamed Ernesto for his predicament. Yes, Ernesto – who was napping like a baby and with no complications whatsoever. For years, Al had only eaten products made in the good old US of A. His culinary patriotism had certainly been reinforced by this episode.

Panama City played host to every imaginable American fast food franchise, so he’d been insulated from indigenous cuisine, other than the local beer and hard liquor, which he seemed to do quite well with.

As Al squatted for the fourth time in two hours, cursing his fate, he wondered how he would get out of the mess he was in. His largest problem was not really knowing what the mess was. Ernesto had turned strangely reluctant to discuss his pursuit by men with guns, other than to restate that they were after him for petty theft. That didn’t sound right – they didn’t send in commandos with ack ack guns over pilfered household goods. But Ernesto was asleep, and Al’s convulsing colon was keeping him fully occupied so they hadn’t had much chance to fully explore the details of Ernesto’s transgressions.

Thank God Carlos had brought a couple of rolls of toilet paper in the burro packs – although if this kept up much longer he might wind up having to use leaves and sticks.

Ernesto came suddenly awake with a hideous scream. Carlos ran over to him, and Al concluded his sojourn in the thicket and also went to investigate. Ernesto was slapping at his wounded leg, howling in agony. Carlos whipped out his can of mosquito repellent and sprayed his wound area, then grabbed one of the water jugs and splashed his leg.

A band of fire ants had been drawn to the bloody gouge, and established a trail to the wound as Ernesto slumbered. The water and spray had done the trick, but not before a series of welts swelled all the way down his leg after the frantic ants had stung him.

Carlos patted his shoulder. “Okay, I know ant stings hurt, but we must get moving now. Your screaming has told everyone nearby where we are. It’s no longer safe here.” Eyes narrowed, he looked around the clearing and canopy. “I hoped we’d get a few more hours of calm before we had to go, but that’s not going to happen. Grab your stuff and let’s go. Ernesto, you can ride on Pablo until the swelling goes down,” Carlos explained, patting the larger of the two burros.

“Where are we headed now? What’s the plan?” Al asked, eyeing the brooding vegetation around them with trepidation.

“We’re going into the Darien Gap,” Carlos told him. “Moving north-east over the mountains until we get across to Colombia. There are a few fishing villages there – Capurgana, Sapzuro, Acandi – we say goodbye at one of these. Which one we make it to depends on condition of the trails on that side…and the weather. From here it’s about thirty-five miles, but it’s some of the toughest miles you will ever see. If we can make it in two days, we’re in race car...” Carlos said.

“Have you ever had any problems going this route?” Ernesto asked.

“I’m not going to lie to you. I know many rebel groups who live in this stretch of jungle, but there are always new
narcotraficantes
moving in and killing each other for territory, so power changes hands – some hands I do not know. We should be safe, but best bet is to avoid contact with anyone we see or hear – many will just shoot first and worry about who they shot later,” Carlos warned.

“Nice,” Al muttered.

“That’s if we’re lucky,” Carlos continued. “If we’re unlucky, we could get chopped into meat by any of twenty different drug factions at war in the region, or a fifteen year old with machine-gun could get trigger happy before we get chance to explain who we are, or one of us step on land-mine that the rebels are now setting where it’s easy to walk – which also keeps army troops from mounting offensive against them.”

Well that was lovely, Al concluded. If the snakes and poisonous spiders and whatnot didn’t get them, and they somehow dodged the headhunters and homicidal gangs of armed predators, then a claymore could take them out just as they were within sight of safety. He considered going back the way he’d come, and then dismissed it. He knew there were bad men with guns back there but the difference was he knew they were definitely there looking for them, whereas up ahead there
might
be bad men, who
might
or
might not
want to slaughter them on sight – so moving forward at least offered a slim reed of hope for survival, whereas returning to the road was certain death.

~

Richard located his headset in his briefcase and plugged it into the telephone. “They’re moving,” he reported.

“Copy that. I can see them on our screen,” came the reply. In the background Richard could hear the
whump whump
whump
of the helicopter blades slicing into the sky.

“What do you think?” Richard asked.

“Obviously this would be easier with a stationary target than one moving through heavy undergrowth. It’s almost impossible to see the ground through the trees, so ideally we should wait until they stop again, preferably in a clearing,” the voice advised.

“I concur, but I want this over with today. Do you want to set down, or stay in the air?” Richard asked.

“I think it would be better to return to our last position on the ground and wait until they go stationary again. We run a lot of risks hovering over the jungle, not the least of which is that one of the locals decides to blow us out of the air just for practice. Right now, they’re maybe ten minutes by air from our staging area, so whenever they stop to take a break, we can be on them.” He paused. “That’s how I’d prefer to play it.”

“All right. Land. But be ready to move at a moment’s notice,” Richard ordered. “I’ll stay on the com channel. Hopefully they’ll stop again within an hour or two, and that’s when we’ll make our move.”

“I just wish we had a more elegant solution than we do. A couple of rockets with no back-blast would solve this pretty quickly,” the voice observed.

“I know, but the AT-4s we can get around here are too dangerous. The back-blast would fry the inside of the chopper, taking you with it,” Richard reminded.

“So we move to plan B. Less elegant, but just as effective. Hopefully.”

~

The scene back at the highway epitomized pandemonium – police vehicles from every outpost within forty miles had raced to the site of the shootout. Groups of officers stood idly chatting with one another while a flatbed tow truck struggled to drag the scorched SUV chassis off the road.

Sergio was the closest thing to a celebrity the police force would have for some time to come. ‘Lone cop takes down an armed load of killers’ would make for a compelling legend – even if there were some holes in his accounting of the incident.

All anyone had to do was look at his police cruiser, riddled with bullet holes, to get an idea of what he’d survived. According to Sergio’s story he’d pulled over to take a leak and the vehicle had sped by headed north, and then backed down the road towards him and started shooting. The tire marks corroborated his version of events, so there were no questions – other than where he’d gotten the AK – which he truthfully admitted having not yet signed into custody following a drug bust the prior week. Against protocol, of course, but given his heroic actions the brass would likely overlook it.

The official report suggested that a car full of armed drug smugglers fearing exposure, and seeing the lone officer, decided to eliminate the only witness to their being on the road by gunning him down. Not so far from the truth as far as Sergio could tell. Sure, he imagined there was more to that story than anyone knew, but he also understood that, whether the gunmen had been after Al and his buddy, or had truly been paranoid traffickers bent on murder, the outcome remained the same.

Gunmen zero.

Sergio three.

With a decoration down the road for heroism, and a probable promotion as word of his actions spread.

One of the nearby vehicles contained a stringer reporter for the largest Panama City newspaper so it was just a matter of hours until his face was plastered throughout the country as a symbol of how seriously Panama took the ongoing war on drugs. As well as a figure for a new unofficial slogan for a police force in need of pride, which would go something like: ‘Don’t Fuck With Me Or I’ll Take You Down’.

Sergio was a genuine hero, and looked every bit the part.

Why ruin a good story with inconvenient facts?

~

After an hour of steadily moving deeper into the Darien, Carlos signaled it was time for a break. All three men were soaked through with sweat, and they gulped greedily from their water bottles. Carlos passed out some pretzels from a small package, advising that they needed to keep their salt intake high so that the water would absorb into their cells and not just flush out through their sweat.

Al took his portable GPS unit from his satchel and powered it on. By his reckoning, they’d come seven miles from the road, maybe a little more. That left thirty-three to go. If they were averaging a couple miles per hour, tops, it would take two more full days to get to the other side of the border. He considered the reality of spending another forty-eight hours in the jungle. His heart sank. Al would have already sold his right arm for a Long Island Ice Tea and a carton of Marlboros – and it had only been eight hours. How bad would this suck by Tuesday?

Ernesto and Al sat a few yards apart, panting, resting their already tired muscles. Carlos looked like he’d just woken up after a nice twelve hour nap – soaked maybe, but not even winded, whereas his companions were tottering on their last legs.

Al supposed that if all you did was roam around the wilds in hundred degree heat, you got used to it pretty quickly. He preferred not to think about how much older Carlos appeared – Al fully understood he was in shit shape and didn’t need any reminders from his well-intentioned internal voice.