Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (13 page)

The kid’s details could wait. The hostage, though, was a Danish national whose name could have been Yan or Jam or Jan – my ears were still clanging from all the shooting. From what I could gather, he’d been working for some NGO on a project in the jungle on the Columbian side of the border when he’d been isolated and captured by the United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia, the organization claimed by a lot of the guys back at the bar, according to the kid. The Dane had been taken around three weeks ago. A couple of hours before I arrived his kidnappers had been told that no ransom would be forthcoming. Tonight they had scheduled him to die.

I managed to extract all this from the kid as we ran back up the path to the suspension bridge. We were running because he believed the folks back at the bar might regroup.

We stopped at the bridge where the Dane, the kid and I would be parting company. “Mr Cooper,
tak, tak
,” the Dane said, shaking my hand. “Thank you, thank you.”

“There was a gunfight, you escaped in the confusion,” I said, coaching him. “You never heard of Mr Cooper, understand?” I patted my chest. “Never there.” The last thing I wanted were headlines, if any should arise from his rescue, compromising my cover.

The Dane caught on. “Okay, okay.
Ja.
I escaped.” His tone then became earnest. “I am sorry. I pulled the trigger. Very sorry.”

“You’d have missed,” I told him. He was shaking the gun so bad I was probably the last person who was gonna get shot, though the powder burns would’ve made up for it.

Over on the Yaviza side, I could see men running along the street with flashlights toward the river.

“Come on, we go,” said the kid who could also see them and was impatient to move.

The Dane shook my hand so vigorously my teeth rattled.
“Tak,”
he said a final time and then ran off to intercept the lights sweeping the opposite end of the bridge.

I followed the kid. He ran a little ways back in the direction of the bar and then took a right, slithering down the steep bank to the river. There were a couple of boats moored there – canoes. He climbed into one of them.

“This yours?” I asked him.

“No, we steal it.”

“A getaway canoe,” I mumbled as I fell into it while he yanked the starter cord. The motor gurgled into life on the second pull. The gearbox sent a thump through the wood as he selected forward and then we were roaring downstream.

Passing under the bridge, the men on it were shouting and trying to find us with their flashlights. I heard the crack of a rifle but I had no idea if the round was meant for us. And in a moment, the lights of Yaviza were gone.

Around ten minutes later, the canoe nudged the riverbank. I jumped out and the kid followed. He then pushed the boat out into the river and the current took it away.

“You got a name, kid?” I asked him as he handed me a machete taken from the canoe.

“Marco,” he replied.

“Where’re we going?”

As it turned out, we weren’t going far, hacking our way through thick virgin jungle strung with countless spider webs. About a klick later, we changed direction and went a hundred feet more or less vertically, up a wall of sharp volcanic rock.

“We stay here tonight. Jungle too dangerous,” Marco explained.

This was his territory so I let it go and gathered some moss and twigs instead.

“Making a fire,” I explained.

“No. No fire. They will find us. Kill us.”

I asked him who and the answer was a shrug.

I let that go too and gathered some more moss to use as padding to sit on, the volcanic rock being about as forgiving as volcanic rock. Marco wanted to stay uncomfortable so that he wouldn’t sleep. “You are taking me to the Saint of Medellín, right?” I asked, settling in.

“No. To his people. The Saint does not live in the jungle.”

Who could blame him? “Where are his people?”

He shrugged. “Fifteen kilometer.” He motioned behind him, indicating the direction with a flick of his hand farther into the depths of the Meanest Place on Earth.

“What’s in it for you?” I inquired.

“Money, whaddya think?” He grinned, affecting my accent. “You are my hostage.”

Right. And nice to see my little speech hadn’t gone to waste. I had more questions, like which of the half dozen or so fucked-up organizations roaming the area did he belong to, but they could wait. It’d been a hell of a day and I’d put in enough overtime. I spread on some DEET, put my head back on the bare rock and watched Marco rack the shells out of his shotgun, clean them on a rag from his pocket and line them up on the rock, pretty relaxed about his role as hostage taker. He then set to work with the rag on the receiver, breech bolt and ejection port. There had been a lot of killing going on here. I took the blank rounds out of my pocket and jiggled them in the palm of my hand. That’s pretty much the last thing I remember till the kid shook me awake, the jungle alive with frogs and birdcalls in the blue, pre-dawn light.

The following two days were spent alternately chopping through the rainforest or climbing through fast-flowing streams as we negotiated the Gap. It was tough going, but no tougher than jungles I’d experienced in the Congo or southern Thailand. There were the usual snakes, thorny bushes, stinging insects and blood-sucking leeches. Maybe I was just getting used to a different kind of normal. That was until we came across a vulture perched on a human head skewered on a cut-down sapling, and then half a dozen more like it five minutes further along. We found the bodies in a heaped pile, buzzing with birds and corpse flies and all were dressed in older-style US Army battledress uniforms or BDUs as they’re called – camos. None of the BDUs carried insignia. No weapons were in evidence though the deceased had more bullet holes than a bootlegger’s ride. Most of the entry holes were in their backs.

“
El Santo de Medellín.
They are his people,” Marco said.

The Saint’s men. “Who would’ve done this?” I asked.

Marco shrugged, which I read as take your pick. “Here is …” He glanced around and didn’t have the language to complete the sentence.

“… the meanest place on earth,” I said, finishing it for him.

“
Si.
” He nodded.

The amount of blood present on the severed necks indicated the decapitations had been post mortem. I couldn’t see any further evidence that the corpses had been tampered with and none of the men’s hands or feet was tied.

The birds had flown off, taking their flapping and squawking with them. An eerie stillness had rushed in to fill the vacuum left behind. I walked the scene quickly. There were no weapons or spent ammunition lying around, though there was plenty of shredded leaf litter. My conclusion based on very little was that these men had been captured, disarmed and then cut down by automatic fire as they tried to run away. Perhaps the guy we found first, out front, had been the sprinter in the group. Marco had already moved on, though he was moving with a lot more caution now. A few steps, pause, look, listen, a few steps more. And even then you couldn’t be sure you weren’t lined up in someone’s sights. Of all the hostile terrain to move through, none is more nerve-racking than the jungle.

And as I was thinking that, I caught a whiff of body odor and suddenly the jungle beside me was carrying AK-47s and machetes. I put my hands in the air and tensed for a burst of lead in the back.

“
Hermanos,
” said Marco hugging a bush, or more accurately a squat human being camoed up, branches from a shrub stuck in his webbing. The ambush we’d just walked into was Marco’s comrades – friends,
hermanos
. A couple of the men smiled at Marco and patted him on the back. And, as Marco’s pal, I smiled too. But the treatment I got was a little less welcoming, catching movement out the corner of my eye. The stock of an AK.

Lights out.

*

The fog between my ears took time to clear and only then I got the picture.

“Hey!” I mumbled.

I was upside down, my damn feet and hands lashed with bark strips to a sapling, swinging between two of Marco’s hermanos like I was headed for some cooking pot.

“Hey!” I said a second time, louder, more focused. My neck hurt, along with my wrists and ankles, to say nothing of my head.

Marco materialized beside me and put his finger to his lips.

It wasn’t easy, but I shut up. Around five minutes later, the porters dumped me on the ground and removed the pole. I rolled onto my side and just lay there, the blood surging back into my hands and feet. Seriously, there had to be a better way to earn a buck.

I took in the surroundings. The immediate area had been semi-cleared and was interspersed with elaborate shelters fashioned from whatever the jungle could provide. Around a dozen men and a few women, all in jungle camouflage, ate, cleaned weapons and mended uniforms. No one spoke above a whisper. I couldn’t hear anything other than the jungle.

Marco and another guy came over and pulled me to a seating position. Marco’s friend looked about twenty-two years of age, blue crucifixes tattooed on his knuckles. He also had a large rusty knife, which he used to cut through the bindings on my hands.

“You no run,” he said quietly in English as he sawed between my ankles. First putting his finger against his lips, reminding me again of the need to keep it down, he whispered, “It is dangerous. We must be sure.”

I guessed he meant sure of me. I rubbed my wrists, scratched my ankles and then rolled my neck back and forth a couple of times. Bones crunched. “Who killed those men? Your people?”

“Somos FARC,”
he said indignantly as if
his
people would never do such a thing. And now, at least, I also knew which flavor of fanatic I was hanging with. Marco continued in a low whisper:
“Ese era el trabajo de un equipo rival cártel de muerte.”
Or, in other words, the massacre was the work of another cartel hit squad, a rival to the one we found being cleaned up by vultures. He then rattled off several sentences that he believed explained the difference between his people, who were Marxist–Leninist idealists, and the brutal pro-government paramilitary scum they were eternally at war with. And then Marco’s friend jumped in with his own version. I nodded agreeably as he spoke, mainly because the guy held a big rusty knife, but otherwise I couldn’t see it. The commies and the fascists both provided services to the Mexican and Colombian cartels, both took hostages, both robbed and both roamed the Darién Gap looking for some financial advantage they were prepared to murder to obtain. The only difference that I could see between them was that I happened to be surrounded by the Marxist–Leninist variety and so therefore that currently made them righter than the other guys. At least for now.

Marco’s pal pulled something from his pocket, a wad of newsprint, and opened it. It was my introduction letter to Juan Apostles: the front page of the
El Diario
with my smiling face and the headline, “Killer”. I’d completely forgotten I’d had it and ol’ Fuckedface back at the bar hadn’t found it on me.

“This you,” Marco’s pal stated.

“
Si,
” I replied.

He patted me on the shoulder as if acknowledging I was in the same club he belonged to. “So, you wan meet Juan Apostles, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Eduardo,” he responded, introducing himself, and we shook on it.

“Marco say you think you work for
el Ángel.
”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe you say nice thing ’bout us.”

“Sure. You scratch my back …”

He nodded and kept nodding, but I could tell he thought I just asked him to scratch my back.

“Now, you pay cash,” said Marco.

*

I spent that night asleep on a bed of palm fronds and saplings laid across a fork in a tree, a black wool blanket over me that smelled of sour milk and campfires, and thanked every god I could think of for the bottle of DEET in my pocket.

The following morning, which began before dawn, I ate some kind of bitter-sweet fruit the size of a tomato that could have been tamarillo, and chewed on a length of sugar cane. Marco, his pal Eduardo and two other men accompanied me through the jungle. We took it slow and steady, stopping to listen for human sounds and taste the air for human scent. That cartel death squad was out there somewhere.

Eventually, around mid-afternoon, Eduardo stopped to pull the fronds off a patch of jungle and revealed another of those getaway canoes. The escort changed out of camos and into old jeans and T-shirts, then all of us dragged the canoe into a small nearby estuary, climbed in and continued the journey.

The air quickly became tangy with salt and, within minutes, the dark jungle canopy was replaced with bright sunshine and the water opened out into marshland. Two fuel stops and three hours later, the sun sinking into haze above the jungle, the canoe motored up a slate-gray tributary clogged with bottles and plastic bags and a variety of old work-horse boats, the black mud on the riverbanks thick with rundown homes, bars and warehouses.

“Turbo,” said Eduardo, providing the name of the place as Marco tied us up against a pier behind a tired old coastal cargo boat.

If you’ve experienced a backed-up toilet, you’ve pretty much got Turbo pegged. The water around the canoe bubbled with methane percolating from rotting sewage pumped into the bay. The town’s reason for being, from what I could tell, was to provide boats for the ride to Capurganá, the last stop before the jump around the Gap to Panama. Turbo was also the terminus for the Pan-American Highway on the South American continent, the Yaviza of Colombia.

The streets hummed with old motor scooters and vans blowing clouds of carcinogens into the evening. Relaxed and no longer in the jungle, Marco lit up a cigarette. I took it out of his mouth and snapped it in half. It felt like the right thing to do. The kid had a chest like a bird.

The first order of business was a stop at the local internet café so that I could transfer ten thousand dollars from my account to Marco’s. Arlen wasn’t going to like it, but FARC’s opening bid for my ransom was a million dollars even, so I figured Uncle Sugar had been let off easy. And I could position it as payment for guide services. An ATM was next, where I withdrew some cash and, by doing so, marked my position as per instructions.