Beneath a Panamanian Moon (18 page)

The river flattened and slowed, and I saw the man's hand flash above the surface. I pulled toward him, kicking across the current.

The river went into a sharp bend and the man was carried into the eddy above the turn, surrounded by circling debris. In a few strokes I was inside the sluggish whirlpool, fighting my way through the trash and snags that pulled at my clothes and tried to drag me under.

The man's eyes were wide with terror. When I grabbed his shirt, he fought me, his arms wheeling, his hands grasping and scratching. I kicked, came up out of the water, and punched the man, as hard as I could, in the jaw. They tell you to do this in lifesaving courses, but they never tell you how difficult it is to knock a man unconscious. I hit him twice more before he went obligingly limp. I rolled him over on his back, put my arm across his chest, and pulled him up to the shore.

At the muddy bank I had to wait for a water snake to glide by before I could drag the man up and into the jungle. The man wasn't breathing, so I tilted his head, cleared his mouth, and started blowing breaths into his lungs. He choked up a fistful of river water and began breathing on his own. That's when I felt the pistol pressed against my head.

“You should have let him drown, Anglo,” the man said.

I sat up slowly, afraid to turn around, afraid to speak, afraid to do much more than breathe.

He grabbed my hair and shook me. “Where are my men?”

“Across the river.”

He kicked me and jerked me to my feet. “We will make a trade,” he said. “We'll see how much the other men value your life.”

The man who had fallen into the river was on his elbows, throwing up cold muddy water. The officer called him Santiago and asked if he was all right. Santiago gave him a look that didn't need any translation, but nodded and said he was.

“Bueno.” The officer handed Santiago his pistol and told him to watch the river.

His knife at my throat, the officer pushed me down the path. We came to a dirt road and a black SUV. The officer called out for Santiago to come. But Santiago didn't answer. With panic rimming his eyes in white, the officer scanned the trees around him. He pulled me back toward the SUV. As he reached for the door handle, he froze, the blade still at my throat. I couldn't see what was behind me, but I could feel the steel edge of his K-Bar bite into my skin.

Cooper ordered the officer to lower the knife. After what was probably the longest moment of my life, the blade came away from my throat. When I could breathe again, I turned around. The officer was on his knees and Cooper had the barrel of the automatic pistol stuck in the man's ear. Cooper whispered to the man, “Be quiet ¿Comprende?”

The man nodded.

“Bueno.” Cooper looked at me and said, “I would have let the bastard drown.”

I shook my head. “No you wouldn't.”

“I would have at least thought about it.”

Fireworks crackled up the road and bullets thunked into the steel of the SUV and tore large, puckered holes out of the window glass.

I dropped and became one with the earth. Shots kicked up wet sand around my face. I rolled out of the road and into the brush. Cooper was behind the SUV, still hanging on to his prisoner. He returned fire with the pistol. “Can you see them?”

I raised my head and the leaves were ripped away by gunfire. I pressed my head into the dirt and hollered, “I see two, but it could be a whole fucking army!”

“I'm coming across.”

“No, don't!” But Cooper was up, dragging the officer with one hand while firing with his other. Dirt flew up and the SUV's windows shattered. The Latino officer, afraid, or brave, or just blindly trying to find cover, pulled the other way and for a moment Cooper hung there, caught in the open road. Bullets snatched Coop's shirt and made it dance, tattering the wet fabric like an old flag.

Cooper still had a fistful of the officer's collar. The officer was on one knee in the road and he held up his hands as if shielding his face from the flying dirt. First his index finger and thumb distorted and then exploded. Then his head, from his hairline up, blew away like newspaper in the wind. Cooper and the trees were sprayed with blood and bone. Coop fell, and before I could stop myself, I crawled into the road, grabbed him by the shirt, and dragged him into the trees.

Cooper sat up and touched his body, his eyes shining with disbelief when he saw the blood on his hand.

“Are you shot?”

Coop stared at his hand.

I touched him, touched his ragged shirt, touched his face, touched his hair and legs, until I was sure he wasn't hit.

Urgent voices shouted from up the road.

“Are you okay? Can you run?”

Cooper nodded, still glassy-eyed with shock.

“Then let's run!” I pulled Cooper to his feet and together we sprinted through the bush toward the river. I heard the men behind us, and I braced myself for the bullet that would find me and tear me into pieces like they had torn into the officer. In a single instant a few spinning chunks of copper-jacketed lead had turned him from a man with thoughts, loves, hates, dreams, and obsessions into a wet pile of rags, meat, and bone.

Cooper and I reached the bank and together we went into the river and swam hard for the far side. Bullets
zick'
d into the water all around us, some skipped off the surface, and others buried themselves in the current. The bank seemed so far away that it was a distant country, and I knew we wouldn't make it.

Phil come out of the treeline and laid down a blanket of fire. The bullets stopped hitting the water long enough for us to make it to the far shore, where Phil was waiting. We scampered up the slippery mud and into the safety of the trees. The sounds of the firefight upriver had slowed to a few sporadic bursts of gunfire.

Coop and I hurried upstream, toward the trail, which I guessed to be several hundred yards away, and hoped to meet up with Phil. When we found him, Phil was kneeling by the bank.

“Are they coming?” Cooper asked him.

“I don't know,” Phil said, “but I'm not waiting to find out.”

“Where are the prisoners?”

“Fuck 'em,” Phil said. “We need to get our asses away from here.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes,” Phil said, and dragged me after Cooper through the bush, downstream, away from the men and the rifle fire, and the officer lying in the road.

We ran as fast as we could through thickets and brambles, piercing thorns and slapping leaves, stinging things and biting things that bug-eyed entomologists would happily catalog in italicized Latin. Slithering things that would have joyfully crawled up my pant leg. But we were moving too fast for nature. We ran, our crashing animal ruckus frightening primates in the trees and propelling flocks of birds into the open air. We ran until our sides hurt and our feet were numb, ran until we could run no longer and we collapsed in a clearing and lay on our backs, huffing daylight and staring up at a small blue patch of sky.

When I could speak I said, “You think we're safe?” My face and neck were whipped raw by wait-a-minute vines and razor grass and the salted sweat dripped into my wounds, keeping me from drifting into a coma.

Cooper said, “No. We're not safe. We've just outrun them.”

A spider monkey sat in a tree above us and watched, curious, as the pale apes below collected their scattered thoughts. Phil saw the monkey and said, “What the fuck you looking at?”

The monkey didn't reply.

Phil picked up a hard green piece of fruit and tossed it in the air a few times, getting its heft.

“What's that,” I said, “something we can eat?”

“Nah. They're called monkey balls,” Phil said. “Some kind of nut or something.” Casually, he threw it at the monkey, not aiming, and not hitting anything but leaves, but the monkey shrieked as if he'd been struck, and jumped up and down on his branch.

Phil tossed another monkey ball, this time grazing fur.

The monkey exploded into a schizophrenic tantrum of shrieks, stomps, Tourettic yips, and primate spittle. Enraged beyond all reason, even for a monkey, he defecated into his tiny hand and pitched it at us, showering us with stinking dollops of monkey shit.

As Phil and I scrambled up and out of the monkey's range, Cooper just closed his eyes and said, “I hate this place. I mean I really hate this place.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It took four hours, two hitched rides in pickup trucks, and a good soaking in the one o'clock rains to get back to the hotel. Iceman was on the gate and when he saw us straggle up the road he said, “Where you boys been? Man, Kelly's looking everywhere for your sorry asses. He thinks you deserted.”

We found Kelly on the hotel veranda. At his feet, spread across a folded sheet, were the parts of an M-60 machine gun, broken down for cleaning. Kelly used a toothbrush, bristles black, to scrub away at the gun's receiver. He saw us, stopped, looked at me and sniffed. “What is that smell, Harper?”

“Monkey shit, sir,” I said.

“Appropriate. Go get cleaned up. I need you to run an errand for the Colonel.”

Cooper interrupted. He told Kelly our story about stumbling across the urban assault course and the ambush. Kelly would hear of it sooner or later, we knew, and we wanted to give him our version before he had a chance to think of other reasons we might be wandering around the jungle, finding things we shouldn't find.

Kelly listened to the story and then spoke slowly, with a patient smile, as if addressing a learning-challenged class. “Our advanced students are taught hostage rescue, Cooper. If you read a newspaper, you would know that kidnapping in Colombia has become the national sport. That is one reason our little resort here is so popular. It was a stroke of genius for the Colonel to put the idea of a vacation together with the training of personal security. Don't you think? Pure genius.”

“What about the men who shot at us?” Phil said.

“Bandits, no doubt. Smugglers, perhaps. This country is never short of violent thugs, Ramirez. You should know that. But I will report this to the local authorities. Now go get yourselves cleaned up before any of the guests see you.”

“May I be there?” I said.

“Be where?”

“When you report this to the authorities, sir, just to make sure you get the details correct, sir, and complete.”

“I'd like to be there, too,” said Coop.

“Yeah, me, too,” Phil said.

Kelly looked at each of us, saved an extra moment for me, and then said, “Fair enough. I'll let you know when he arrives and then you can make your statements. In the meantime, make yourselves presentable.”

As I was showering I found several leeches stuck to my chest and back. I pulled them off, with shivers of disgust, and watched light-headed as my blood circled the drain at my feet.

By the time I'd dressed, Ren, fresh from interrogation himself, came up and told me that a policeman was waiting in the bar.

“I'm glad to see you, Ren. How'd you do with the cops?”

“They let me go,” he said, and touched his swollen lip. “Lack of evidence. It wasn't too bad. A guy from the State Department came down and got me out, you know how it goes.”

“Yeah, I do.” Ren seemed rather quiet, but I guessed the Panamanian police got Ren to talk enough for two lifetimes.

“When you're done,” Ren said, “Kelly wants us to run an errand.”

I agreed to meet him later and walked down to the bar. Sitting at a rear table was a small man with a mustache and short hair. He wore a white guayabera shirt and when we approached the table he stood and shook our hands, introducing himself as Lieutenant Consuerte. When we were all seated he said, “I understand you gentlemen had some trouble with bandits this morning.”

“I'm not convinced they were bandits,” Coop said.

“They were armed with AKs,” Phil said.

“And behaved like soldiers,” I added.

“Tell me what happened,” the Lieutenant said, and pulled a small tape recorder out of a briefcase at his feet. “You don't mind if I record this, do you?”

“No, not at all,” Coop said.

We each gave our version of what happened, again leaving out a few details, just in case this man was easily corrupted. Thirty minutes later the Lieutenant turned off the tape recorder, put it back into his briefcase, and stood up. “I'll let you know what we turn up,” he said. “But I suspect you stumbled into a band of smugglers, that's all.”

“A man was killed,” Coop said, barely able to hold back his anger.

The Lieutenant shrugged, his hands up, accepting the hard realities of life. “Such things happen, Señor Cooper. These smugglers do not share our respect for one another. Killings occur every day. Sadly, that is a fact of life in Panama.”

The Lieutenant promised he would investigate and get back to us. He left the three of us standing in the hotel lobby. As the Lieutenant climbed into his gray sedan Phil said, “If that guy's a cop, I'm a monsignor.”

Cooper watched the sedan drive away and said, “I got a bad vibe. What about you?”

“I don't know about Panama cops, but Washington cops wouldn't be wearing those shoes.” They stared at me, waiting. “They're Corfam,” I explained. “Great for when the brass comes through, because they keep a high shine, but they're worthless for street work, especially in hot weather, and in case you hadn't noticed, it's fucking hot down here.”

“How do you know so much about cop shoes?” Phil said.

“I dated a woman on the force.” Cooper and Phil exchanged a glance. “Yeah, so, she was great with handcuffs, is that what you wanted to hear?”

Cooper said, “No details, please.”

“And did you see the gun?”

“A twenty-two,” Phil said. “That's no cop gun. More like an assassin.”

Ren came into the lobby and said, “How 'bout it, Monkeyman, you ready to roll?”