09-Twelve Mile Limit (41 page)

I risked angering him further by saying, “No. Back Door Enterprises, that’d make sense. But not Backyard. Where’s the name come from?”

“Think about it. How often do you hear people say it in the States? People need oil, but they won’t let the oil companies drill. They get hysterical—not in our backyard, they can’t. People create waste, all kinds of waste: petroleum and plastic and—” He nodded as if he could see me catching on. “And they create nuclear waste, too. A major nuclear plant creates only about a dump truck full of spent rods a year. Hell, the French, of all people, have proven how damn safe it is—but same thing. People go ape-shit. Safe or not, no matter how much it’s regulated, no one’s going to let it be dumped. Not in their backyard.”

Sergeant Tyner gestured grandly toward the bulletproof glass and the jungle vista beyond. “So welcome to my backyard. No regulations, no rules, no controls. The world needs lumber? I’ve got it. A dumping ground? I’ve got that, too.” His voice lowered slightly, as if he were about to share a valuable secret with me. “Have you ever noticed, Commander, that the more sophisticated a society becomes, the more adolescent it behaves? Back in the States, they want all of the benefits but refuse the responsibilities. Let’s face it, most people are sheep. And they’re cowards, too.”

Now the little man reached out and tapped his index finger on my chest, an intentional invasion. “You know why they’re cowards? Because they know the truth, but they won’t allow themselves to admit it. You know the truth. I know the truth. What we’ve done, our lives, our actions prove it. But the common person—they can’t handle it. It terrifies them.”

I looked at his finger until he took his hand away, and then I said, “The truth about what?”

Blue eyes glittering, Tyner used his head to indicate the doorway. “Follow me. You’ll understand. I’ll show you. You’re one of the few.”

Down two flights of stairs, dug deep into the hillside, walled with thick cement and barred by double sets of locked, fireproof doors, was Sgt. Curtis Tyner’s armory—the Vault.

I followed him out of some perverse desire to prove he was wrong but felt a strange sense of unreality. He kept saying over and over that he and I had much in common, that we were alike in many ways. Even to myself, I could not prove how wrong he was until I had seen it all, whatever it was. It was the only way to prove that I was right, at least, in my hope that we could not have been more different.

But if I were so certain, why did I feel such overwhelming dread?

He used three different keys to unlock the metal doors, and when the doors swung open, he reached into the darkness, touched a switch, and an apartment-sized room was illuminated with sterile neon. I’d expected some fashion of survivalist bunker—a safe place to sit out WW III—but, instead, I stepped into a precisely maintained little arsenal. The walls were lined with professional-quality gun lockers; the stainless-steel bench tables were as neatly kept as those in my own lab.

Tyner began opening lockers, handing me equipment: an Autovon voice-activated radio, with headset (“Tonight, we’ll have to be in close radio contact”), Generation 5 night-vision goggles (“My team owns the night—it’s our biggest advantage”), and several choices of body armor, or bulletproof vests.

I accepted it all without comment, certain that he was creating a little mote of time, a period of linear decompression, before showing to me whatever it was he wanted me to see.

Perhaps it was to get a more pure reaction. There may have been something in my face he expected to read. Whatever the reason, I was right.

When I had all the gear piled in my arms, I said, “Well, I better get back and check on how Keesha’s doing. And get some sleep.”

He held up two index fingers—twin exclamation points—and replied, “Not yet. There’s one more thing you need to see. My collection. Did you forget? It’s why we’re here.”

On the far wall was the biggest of all the brown metal gun lockers, and he used another set of keys to open the double doors. Inside, on shelf after shelf, row after row, were what looked to be small glass aquariums but were probably terrariums because I didn’t smell the familiar ozone odor that I knew so well.

Instead, the open lockers filled the room with an unusual leathery, musty smell, a slightly acrid air.

When Tyner touched another light switch, I saw why.

Inside the locker, inside the glass housings, were rows of tiny, shrunken, human heads. Dozens. A hundred. Probably more. All males, and every race represented. Each head was isolated, individualized, by its own thin, glass boundary. Eyes and lips sewn shut, the miniature faces were frozen in various expressions of horror or pain, but all shared a dumb look of final, abject submission.

As I stood, feeling the shallowness of my own breathing, surprised by my own calm, Tyner said, “That Indian girl you’re with. Did you see the black tattoos on her ankles? She’s from farther south in the Amazon. I know her tribe well. She’s a Jivaro.”

He smiled. “Her people are the ones who do this for me. Headhunters. The shrinking of human heads—it’s their most devout expression of art. The ones who avoid contact with us, they’re the ones who do it because they love it. Your girlfriend—she’s almost certainly eaten human flesh. Still think she’s worth the price of a doctor?”

I swallowed, trying hard to keep my expression indifferent, to show him nothing, allow him no private insights into my reaction—it would have seemed a violation of my person—as I replied, “Is there a difference between the craftsman and the collector?”

He laughed, and waved me closer. “Touché! You’re right, I’ll accept that. Point well made.” He paused before he added: “From one craftsman to another.”

I listened to him tell me about some of his trophies. He had the swagger stick again and was using it as a pointer. I listened to his concise description of individual hunts as they related to a specific head. He had an expert, almost scientific, approach when describing the final shot that felled each.

He touched the swagger stick to a case that contained a tiny head with a face the size and color of a very small, angry mandrill, but it wore a disproportionately long, squarish beard. The head was mounted on a pillow-sized purple turban and over a white conical kalansuwa, both of which looked to be stained by blood.

“This is the guy I was telling you about, the one who tried to get into the cocaine business in my territory, but ended up back on the farm, feeding livestock. His name was Rashid, Rashad … something like that. I knew I wanted to take him alive, and when my spotter first found him in the scope, we were half a mile away.

“I was using a HK Weapon System, a PSG-1 on a kind of lark because, as you know, optimal firing accuracy can only be achieved with single-loaders. Dispersion diameters and acceptance specifications call for something a little better that those shitty 7.62mm NATO rounds, so I’d loaded my own—right here in this room. I loaded very hot, very heavy.

“But still, it was a cold-bore shot. You’ve been through the training, Commander. When the barrel’s cold, you’re never really sure where the first one’s going to go, are you? Plus the air was dense. So I did all the required calculations—range, distance, wind, and refracted heat—but mostly used my intuition, my instincts, before squeezing off a round.

“It seemed to take two or three minutes, watching Rashad through the scope, before the round finally busted his femur out from under him and knocked his turban crooked. Rashid, Rashad—whatever his name was—he had this expression on his face: Offended! Absolute disbelief. A profound look of surprise beneath a crooked turban, hands flopping around. It was almost comical.

“I consider it one of the finest shots I’ve made—or witnessed. I’m not bragging, mind you. I’m a professional. Keeping an enemy alive is so much harder than killing him.”

I stood there listening to Tyner talk—lecture, actually, for that’s what he was doing—and I’m not certain why. I could have turned and walked away. I could have told him the truth about himself: that he was mad. He’d stayed in this place so long that it had strangled all the humanity out of him—if there had been an element of humanity in him to begin with. He said he had grown up in Iowa? I could have told him another truth: He had traveled much too far ever to find his way back to his home state.

But I didn’t. I stood and listened. Listened to him tell me about Keesha’s people, the Jivaro. That they were artists of the first magnitude. That they, above all others, were preoccupied with realism, and so took utmost care to maintain the original likeness of the slain victim’s face.

Tyner explained, “They believe the power of a dead man’s soul is still dangerous, and that taking and shrinking the head of an enemy is the only way to conquer and destroy his soul. Plus, it’s a hell of an insult for a man’s head to be perverted and owned by another man. To a Jivaro, an enemy’s head is the equivalent of the Medal of Honor to an American soldier.”

He explained the process to me. I refused to listen attentively, though some of the details still got through: A slit was made up the back of the neck, and the skin peeled off the skull, which was then discarded. Then eyes and lips were sewn shut with fine native fiber. The actual shrinking process was extremely delicate and precise. Heated stones and hot sand were used, and the head had to be constantly rotated to prevent scorching.

“Finally,” Tyner said, “a hole is made in the top of the head, and a thing called a kumai inserted so that that it can be worn around the neck. The process takes weeks, and the artist is required to work twelve, fifteen hours a day.” His tone became emphatic. “The collection I have, you couldn’t put a dollar value on it. It’s the best in the world. Priceless.”

Tyner had been looking up at the rows of glass containers. He clearly took great pride in his collection, though I got the impression that he didn’t visit here often. Perhaps it took some special occasion—the addition of a new trophy? Or an unexpected guest.

Which is probably why I was so taken aback when he said, “Choose one. Any one you want, pick it out.”

“No, thanks. I don’t want one of your shrunken heads, Sergeant.”

“I’m not offering to give you one, Commander.” He chuckled, then began to laugh. “Can you imagine the looks you’d get at customs at Miami International? No. I’m offering to let you wear one. Around your neck. You can see how it feels …” He jabbed his thumb at the rows of tiny, simian faces. “Because this is the truth. What it all comes down to. Find out what it’s like, for a change, to wear honesty on the outside of your shirt. I think you’ll be amazed at how it feels.”

I shook my head as I said, “If we’re going to leave at one in the morning, I need to get some sleep. Good night, Sergeant Tyner.” I lifted my newly issued gear off the lab table, and turned to go.

Behind me, I heard him say, as if testing me, “Tonight, at that compound in Remanso, you know what my men have been instructed to do, don’t you? For us, it’s standard operating procedure.”

I waited.

After a pause, I heard him say, “If it flies, it dies; if it’s got a head, it’s dead. We’re going to kill them all. Everyone but the hostages. If you’ve got a problem with that—if it’s somehow a breach of your personal ethics, tell me now. We’ll leave you behind.”

I said, “I’m aware of your methods. My friends are up there. I’m going.”

Tyner said, “And participating. That’s important, Commander. Not just because of the bounties my men will receive. People like that, people who visit violence on civilians, extermination is the only remedy. You’re a biologist, you’ve studied Darwin. How did he put it? ‘The struggle for life is most severe between individuals of the same species. Only the fittest can survive.’ Something like that. I probably need to have a look at his work again, refresh my memory. But do you agree?”

I turned and looked at him, hating what I saw, hating him because he’d been right all along—about him, about me—and hating him now because he was right once again. I said, “Yes. I do agree.”

He smiled, nodding—I couldn’t be certain if it was because he was surprised or relieved. “Good. Frankly, I was a little worried about taking you on this mission. That you’d lost your … professionalism, let’s say. Isn’t it irksome when our heroes let us down? But it’s still there. I can see it in your eyes. So there’s one last thing I want to ask you, Commander. Do you mind?”

“Why would I?”

“Okay, we’ll see. The question is this: from what I’ve heard, what I’ve read, you were directed to take executive action against seventeen people—”

“That’s not true!” I interrupted, suddenly furious that he had such an intimate knowledge of my past.

His voice rose, to cover mine: “Though you actually carried out only thirteen of the orders, because you refused to execute actions against women. But of the thirteen men you eliminated, you used nothing but your hands on seven of them. No knives, garrotes, nothing. Just your hands.” He had moved closer to me, looking up into my face, his eyes intense, fascinated. His voice was almost a whisper now, as he pressed, “Why? It was obviously your method of choice. But why?”

He knew too much for me not to answer—and it would also have seemed an infidelity to the person I hoped and believed I’d now become: the quiet biologist who loved to work in his lab, the guy who delighted in sunset beers with his many friends back on Sanibel Island.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, because it was quieter, maybe.” But I was already shaking my head, knowing that was a lie and an evasion, so I let myself think about it for several long beats before I said in a more reflective voice, “I chose that way, that method because … because it was more … because it was more personal.”

I could see in Tyner’s expression that he misunderstood completely, an obscene misinterpretation that I could hear it in his grinning, locker-room reply: “Outstanding! Yeah, man, up close and personal. Listen to their heart stop. It makes sense now. Perfect.”

At exactly 12:45 A.M., I heard the little Bell helicopter fire up out on the heli pad to the north of the complex, and I trotted all my gear up the hill to where Tyner stood far from the strobing luminescence of aircraft running lights, backdropped by the paler incandescence of a copper Amazon moon.