Road Fever (11 page)

I thought about it as the sun ignited another cloud and the waves came in like pale blood. Natalie was sleeping peacefully in Garry’s arms.

“What do you do?” I asked finally.

“Do the Magic Bunny!” Lucy squealed.

R
EGARDING THOSE PESKY
gasoline and lighter bandits, Graham Maddocks thought it best if we didn’t let ourselves get into such a situation. Which was rather my idea to begin with, though Graham insisted there was a benefit in understanding that it could happen. He wanted to examine every possible worst-case scenario, in detail. The record attempt, he said, should be run like a military operation. A soldier does not encounter problems he has not trained for, or at least considered. A soldier should know all his options. I had a lot of trouble thinking of myself as a driver, much less a soldier.

Graham Maddocks was a dark-haired, handsome fellow with an ingratiating smile and a polite manner. He was not overly tall, nor did he seem, at first glance, to be heavily muscled. An average sort of guy. Except that after listening to him for a while and examining the way he held himself, I began to see that he was as solid as a chunk of chiseled granite. You could peg a golf ball into his chest and it would come zinging off as if it had hit a brick wall. He was, I thought, a concealed weapon, in and of himself.

Garry had met Maddocks in January, in Peru, drinking Pisco sours at the bar of the Hotel Gran Bolívar in Lima. Graham was taking a break from his duties on the Victoria, British Columbia, Emergency Response Team, which was basically a special weapons and tactics squad. In order to avoid burnout or the suicidal depression that plagues some cops, Graham took long climbing vacations in South and Central America. Risking death on solo climbs in the high Andes gave him a sense of control over his life that police work tended to erode.

Aside from his work with the Emergency Response Team, Graham had served as a bodyguard for British royalty in the Bahamas. As a hostage negotiator, he knew something about the terrorist’s motivation and aspirations. Significantly, he had trained with the British SAS, a force whose antiterrorist squads are considered the most skilled in the world.

At the Hotel Gran Bolívar, Garry found himself grilling the policeman about various South American scams. Maddocks was fascinated with the various schemes crooks had devised to separate inattentive gringos from their money. He was a professional officer who collected crime stories in the way an entomologist might collect butterflies. The more brightly colored and flamboyant the scheme, the more skillfully executed it was, the more Graham Maddocks treasured it. Scams were his hobby.

Maddocks didn’t have a lot of respect for the practitioners of the simple dodge. Climbers, for instance, were continually losing their packs on bus rides to the mountains. “What happens,” Graham said, “is that the overhead rack is filled and the climber will put his bag in the rack several seats back.” He assumes that anyone trying to steal his gear will have to walk past him, with the pack, to exit. But when the bus stops to pick up and disgorge passengers, someone in the back simply hands the pack through an open window to a confederate on the street.

Not much skill involved in that modest crime of opportunity. There were better examples of the art of thievery in the larger cities, Lima, for instance, where highly skilled teams of pickpockets could create a diversion while a master razor man slashed open the bottom of a woman’s leather purse and caught the contents.

A less remarkable method of picking pockets was the ubiquitous dirty diversion. Someone who looks fairly presentable poses as a helpful local. As you walk by he notices some dirt on your shirt, generally on the upper arm, just below the point of the shoulder. He wipes it off for you—actually he is wiping the dirt on as he pretends to wipe it off—and someone else picks your pocket. “The dirt,” Graham said, “is the diversion. It takes your mind off your wallet. But, consider: what does a person who is scrabbling on the street care if some gringo has dirt on his shirt? Anything unusual, anything that doesn’t make sense is a likely diversion.”

Garry sipped his Pisco sour and expressed some doubt that these scams were all that widespread. Maddocks suggested they take a stroll around the Plaza San Martin. “Keep your eyes open,” he said. Minutes
later, in a crowded alleyway, someone actually made the mistake of rubbing dirt on Graham Maddocks. “Señor, you have …” Garry was flummoxed: here was the dirty diversion in the flesh. There was a momentary blur of action, then a frozen tableau: Graham staring down the dirt wiper, his right hand behind him, gripping the wrist of a second man who had his hand in Graham’s back pocket. The first man turned and ran. Another blur of action. Graham was now facing the pickpocket. Somehow he had gotten hold of both the man’s wrists and was holding them just at chest level in an iron grip. Maddocks stared at the fellow, smiled sadly, and shook his head.

“Uh, Graham,” Garry said. Maddocks glanced over at Sowerby, dropped the pickpocket’s arms, and let him go running off into the crowd.

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever worked as a security consultant?”

G
RAHAM
M
ADDOCKS
had prepared a twenty-page report regarding security on our drive, and we went over each recommendation in detail. We were sitting on lawn chairs in Garry Sowerby’s backyard. Fat bees buzzed among the flowers and there was a symphony of birdsong in progress. It seemed as if bandits and terrorists belonged to a distant and probably fictional world.

Graham said that one option regarding gasoline bandits was to keep the windows closed when passing slowly through towns. And for those gasoline-minded persons inclined to break windows in order to indulge their predilections, Graham suggested heavy-gauge chicken wire on the outside of side windows and on the windscreen. Bulletproof glass was okay, though it wouldn’t stop certain kinds of rounds, and was so heavy it would affect the performance capabilities of the truck. Graham thought we would be protected from bullets fired from the front. The engine block would stop just about anything. If they were firing from the front, just duck down and accelerate. Piece of cake. On the other hand, it takes only a minute or so until futile front firing becomes somewhat more lethal and problematic side firing. Light bulletproofing in the doors was a good idea, though it wasn’t impervious to certain high-powered rounds. And we were, Graham thought, most vulnerable to shots fired from behind. What we needed was a big slab of tempered steel set behind the extended cab.

All of this—it’s not just a truck anymore, it’s an armored vehicle—would cost us in weight and performance. I found myself sinking deep into a kind of glowering paranoia. How about one guy, he’s not driving,
he locks himself up in a little metal egg? How about maybe we just stay home and watch TV?

A less costly armor option was bulletproof vests. Biker’s goggles in case someone breaks the windshield. Garry, having been shot at previously, was furiously taking notes. I began to wonder why I had never had a problem in Latin America. Not once. My experience was that people invite you into their homes and stuff you full of food for days at a crack.

Graham’s perception was much the same, though he attributed his good fortune to forethought and awareness. Likely we would have little problem, but if we expected everything to run smoothly, we were literally asking for trouble. People who don’t expect to encounter obstacles encounter obstacles. It was the way of the world.

In his job, Graham had spent a lot of time consoling victims of violent crimes. “The one thing I hear all the time is, ‘I couldn’t believe it was happening to me, I never thought it could happen to me.’ ” Garry nodded vigorously. That’s what he thought. Never heard of Shiftas before and suddenly there’s six of them firing guns at him. It had taken minutes—minutes!—before he had been able to react.

We, Garry and I, decided against turning the truck into a tank. We’d take bulletproof vests and goggles. Graham said that we should conduct some ambush drills and have several options in mind in case of ambush. He thought it most likely that an ambush would occur at night. The first option was the back up and drive away. Simply stop some distance from the obstruction on the road. Maybe it would be a fallen tree, or a staged accident. Examine the situation from a distance. Graham had heard of several cases in which people had stopped to render help in such circumstances. When they got out of the vehicle, they were kidnapped, robbed, beaten, killed.

If the obstacle looked dangerous in any way, back up and drive away. In any case, check the mirrors. Is there a car following? Armed men on foot? If so, consider the second option: the drive around. With our four-wheel drive and high clearance, we could probably escape quite easily. It was unlikely that anyone would have a vehicle with the off-road performance capabilities of our truck. I had a vision of upscale cowpunks cruising over the desert, leaving the bandits in the dust. I liked that scenario. There was a certain romance to it.

“Naturally,” Graham said, “smart bandits are not going to set up an ambush in a place that allows you to drive around. In a mountain environment, you may have a cliff on one side of the road and a rock wall on the other. In the desert there may be deep irrigation ditches
lining the Pan-Am, and a jungle ambush would probably occur in thick forest.”

So: the third option in an ambush scenario was the ram and drive through. As an illustration of what not to do, Graham told a story about Princess Anne. One day in London, years ago, her limo was blocked by a compact car. The driver of the compact, a mental patient, shot the limo driver dead when he got out to investigate. The mental patient fired five rounds into the limo. He said later that, for reasons that seemed inexplicable to all, he needed to frighten the princess. “And it turned out,” Graham said, “that the limo driver had little or no training in ambush and abduction. He should never have stopped for a compact. He could have simply pushed it out of the way.”

That was our final ambush option and there were two methods. The first involved simply pulling up to the blocking vehicle and pushing it out of the way. That was if we felt that an abduction would take place only if we got out of the truck. The second method was more spectacular. If we felt that the ambush party was armed, if there was no way to turn and run, no way to drive around, then we could, at our discretion, floor it and crash through. “I like the heavy crash bar you have on the front,” Graham said. “Get up some speed and hit the blocking vehicle at its lightest point. Hit it where the engine isn’t.”

Aside from ambushes, we could very well run into a riot or two. We knew there were civil disturbances every couple of weeks in Panama, not to mention a tense situation at the border of Peru and Chile, and another at the Peru-Ecuador border. What would be happening in Central America when we got there was anyone’s guess. Riots could be vexatious and Graham suggested, quite sensibly, that we flee the scene immediately. “The longer you stay as a riot develops, the less you look like an innocent bystander.”

Graham had once found himself in just such a situation. There was a crush of people behind him and police lines were forming in front. “I just walked toward the police and they parted to let me through. It was fairly obvious that I wasn’t involved and just wanted to get out of there.”

Most Latin American civil disturbances, Graham felt, were pretty ritualistic in nature. They generally happen in some major square, a gathering place, usually the site of past riots.

The ritual of the riot, in Graham’s experience, went something like this:

People gather.

The police form lines.

There is a period of mutual provocation.

The police overreact and beat the hell out of everybody. Or they gas the demonstrators. Hose them down. Sometimes they fire into the crowd.

So it was best to avoid the ritual riot square. “You see reports on television—people getting clubbed or throwing rocks at police—and you assume that the entire country is in turmoil. But usually it’s just one specific area—a square, a plaza—and three blocks away, nothing is happening.”

Urban riots were one thing, but in rural areas the major road through the country often takes on political significance. Dissident groups sometimes halt traffic in an effort to prove that the government does not control the country. In Chile, for instance, striking labor unions sometimes throw “tire busters” on the Pan-American Highway. These were, Graham said, sharp, pointed nails twisted like children’s jacks and thrown onto the road by the handful.

“So,” Graham said, “you should be aware of the political situation.”

Neither Garry nor I considered ourselves political, and I had been assigned the dirty job of trying to comprehend the situation in each country. “For the past six months,” I told Maddocks, “I’ve read
The Miami Herald
.” The paper seemed to have the best and most comprehensive coverage of Latin America. I also read the
The Times of the Americas
and the
Tico Times
out of Costa Rica.

Garry and I had also talked to people who drove the roads we expected to travel. In Honduras we met a truck driver who explained that leftist rebels in El Salvador often cut off the road in the southeast portion of that country. “They put announcements in the paper,” the man said. “Traffic will be interdicted between this date and that.” Interdicted means that drivers get killed. “I was driving through on a free travel day,” the guy said, “and I got stopped anyway. They said they needed my battery to make a bomb. Left me there with a completely disabled vehicle. But they apologized profusely for inconveniencing me. If it had been an interdiction day they would have killed me.”

In addition to political danger, we could encounter drunken pedestrians or deadly drivers. “If there is an accident,” Graham said, “if somebody runs an intersection, something like that, assume all the blame immediately and ask them how much. Pay them whatever they ask and run for it. If anyone is hurt, same deal. If, God forbid, someone darts out in front of the truck, and you hit him, assess the injuries and offer big money. Maybe a thousand dollars. Do it quick and get out.”