09-Twelve Mile Limit (36 page)

One thing I didn’t doubt: The girl wasn’t with these men by choice. She had a subdued look of fear and emotional resignation. It is an expression I had seen before on the faces of captives and new prisoners.

It would not be pleasant to be in the control of men such as this, especially for a girl her age.

I moved quietly from tree to tree, ducked low and kept in the shadows. When I was close enough to hear the soldiers clearly, I knelt and opened the briefcase. I was wearing my SIG Sauer on my hip, belted into a holster I’d borrowed from Ron Iossi. I was surprised that the force of my fall hadn’t ripped it free, but the holster snap had held.

Now I took out the little submachine gun, locked the dual magazines in place, and pushed the little indicator switch until it was on full automatic.

I waited.

Not surprisingly, the guerrillas were looking for anything they could find of value among the wreckage. They’d collected a few things on the perimeter, not much: a couple of weapons and a can of ammo that had somehow been thrown clear of the fire.

I decided they sounded drunk because they were drunk. One of them had a bottle of cloudy liquor and was passing it around.

I listened as over and over they replayed what had happened, how it had happened. Among male hunters, it is a very old ceremony: elevate and institutionalize the success of a hunt. I listened to them argue among themselves about how they’d first heard the chopper, how they’d run to get into position, and how the youngest of them—a kid named Marcos—had been so damn nervous to be shooting his first Stinger at a real live target.

“You made a mess in your pants!” they chided him. “But thanks to our help, you scored blood!”

That was bad enough, but then it abruptly became worse.

Suddenly, they all stopped talking at once, heads tilting in unison as if straining to hear.

Then I heard what had given them pause: a low, moaning sound from the nearby trees, louder than the bellows wind from a burning fire. The men grew more silent, weapons at ready, as the moaning grew louder, and then they all took a step back when, into the circle of light, stumbled what had to be a human being but who looked like no human I had ever seen.

One of the commandos had survived the crash. Or maybe it was the pilot. I couldn’t tell. His clothes and his skin had been burned off him, and, but for one terrible bright and agonized eye, his face was gone.

Apparently, he’d been hiding but could no longer stand the pain, for he walked toward them, mummy-like, arms outstretched, still smoldering, calling, “I need a doctor, I’ve been injured! Please help me! Mother of God, please help me!”

When they realized what this aberration was, the rebels visibly relaxed, even seemed to find the situation funny.

One of them turned to the silent girl and yelled, “Where is your tribe of cannibals? We have a cooked meal for them!” as he stuck out his leg and tripped the injured man.

Hilarious.

I was already up and walking toward their group, moving before I realized what I was doing, the little submachine gun in my left hand, the 9mm pistol in my right. I stepped into the clearing, into the light of the fire. It was the only way I could instantly change the angle of my approach and put the girl out of the line of fire.

She was the first to see me. I saw surprise register on her face, then maybe just a flicker of hope.

Whap-whap-whap.

One of the rebels had touched his automatic weapon to the back of the burned man’s head and fired the three-shot volley.

The man’s body quivered, a muscle-reflex response to severe trauma. I found myself relieved when he finally lay still.

But there was no going back for me. I’d committed myself. So I continued walking toward them, the MP-5 at hip level, but sighting over the top of the pistol that I held outstretched toward them. I didn’t yell, because I wanted my words to communicate meaning, not emotion.

Speaking just loud enough for them to hear me clearly, I said, “Drop your weapons. Now, or you’re dead.”

I was surprised by the calmness of my own voice.

So were they. The men turned as one, the woman watching all of us, backing away, as her captors stood frozen, weapons slung over their shoulders or held low.

I fired a short burst with the machine gun, over their heads—but not by much.

They ducked reflexively as I yelled, “Drop your weapons!”

They all did—except for one.

The man carrying the liquor bottle was the same one who’d shot the burned commando.

Some people get a taste for killing. They like it.

He was a tall guy with a very black, very thick beard and baggy fatigues. He wore new Nikes—a modern touch. As the others slowly unslung, then dropped their rifles, black-beard remained motionless, staring at me, AK-47 in one hand, the bottle in the other. His expression was familiar, a mean-drunk look, defiant, dumb.

I fired another short burst, yelling, “Do it.”

As I did, I saw his expression change, knew what was going to happen, understood the sudden decision he’d just made, and hated it. He tossed the bottle away, probably to divert my attention, as he snapped his rifle upward toward me, already firing.

I leaned toward him, squeezing off four fast shots with the pistol, and watched the rounds knock him backward, contorting his face and body as if he were taking blows from an invisible bat. He continued firing wildly as he fell.

I dived to the right, rolling as I did, still focused on their small group. Two of his own men—one of them the kid named Marcos—were backpedaling drunkenly, both of them hit by black-beard’s fire. The other two had dropped to their bellies.

I screamed, “Get your hands away from those weapons!” as black-beard hit the ground and the firing stopped. I sprayed another short burst just above them to make my point. Then I got to my feet, heart pounding.

The girl was still there. I was surprised by that. Why hadn’t she run—let these crazy men fight it out among themselves?

The two rebels who’d been hit were writhing in the dirt, crying for help. They’d both taken rounds in the back and legs. Black-beard was still moving, too, trying to get to his stomach, trying to crawl.

I could see that the two healthy rebels were giving it some thought, trying to decide what to do, so I walked toward them yelling, “Hands behind your heads! Hands behind your heads!”

As I repeated it a third time, black-beard tensed, then his body seemed to deflate.

I didn’t want to get so close that they could use their hands to try to trip me, so I said to the girl, “Do you speak Spanish?”

In the orange light of the burning helicopter, her eyes were black pools, her face a brown mask. She nodded.

“Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”

She shrugged.

“Okay. Then I want you to walk behind them, take their weapons, and place them over there, near the wreckage. Be careful, they can go off. Don’t throw them. Put them down carefully.”

She stared at me for a moment, thinking about it. Her voice was deeper than I expected to be, but still girlish. A teenager in the rain forest. “You’re not going to kill them?”

I shook my head. “We get their weapons, throw them in the river, they’re not going to bother us anymore. I’ll help you. I promise. You can trust me.”

Once again, she gave me a considered look that seemed void of emotion. Then she walked quickly to where the guerrillas lay on the ground. At black-beard’s body, she paused, touching him experimentally with her bare foot.

He did not move.

I said, “I think he’s dead.”

Her response surprised me. “Too bad.”

Then I watched her kneel and pick-up the AK-47 that black-beard had used. She looked at the barrel, looked at the trigger, then looked at me.

Why was she behaving so oddly?

“Hurry up! We need to get moving.”

The two wounded guerrillas were still groaning, calling for help, and she looked at them, rifle in her hands, before looking at the two men on the ground at her feet. Then, before my brain could process what was happening, she shouldered the rifle, and shot both of them in the back and head with short bursts.

“What are you doing?”

I was running toward her as she turned and emptied the rifle into the bodies of the two wounded men.

“Stop it!”

Then she looked at me, as if I might be next, but I could see her brain processing it. No, she would not shoot me … and so she threw the weapon away from her, her eyes staring into mine.

I stopped running, looked at her through the jungle’s vacuum of silence, and heard her say. “Good. They’re all dead now.”

Then she turned to black-beard. “I wish you had not killed this pig. He was the worst. Him, I would have taken back to my village and given to the old women for a night. They know the ways to deal with bad men. Then I would have taken his head.”

Her name was a windy, guttural sound—Kee-shew-ha-RA ?—that I tried to pronounce several times, but couldn’t get right.

Finally, she said, “The year that the missionaries came, they called me Keesha. I hated them, but it is a name that you may use for the time we’re together.”

At the wreck site, she’d insisted that I wait while she yanked a few strands of hair from each guerrilla. It was a compromise: She’d asked me for a knife. She wanted to decapitate black-beard.

When I refused, she told me, “The things he did to me I will never say.”

After hearing that, waiting for her while she plucked out a few strands of her kidnapper’s hair seemed a minor indulgence.

Now, as she led me through the forest toward the river, walking single file and fast, I listened to her explain that she was from an Amazon people called the Jivaros, but that her smaller tribal group was called the Shuar.

“My family would be very angry at me,” she added, “if I did not exercise my right to tsantsa, or untsuri suara. Those men hurt me and my brother, so I killed them. But their spirit still remains in their hair. You would not allow me to take a head, so taking their hair is an acceptable alternative.”

Back in her village, Keesha told me, she would use beeswax to attach the hair to gourds.

“In that way,” she said, “I will still have taken their heads. When I marry, I will hang the gourds outside my door, and so continue to own my enemy’s muisak, their avenging souls. My husband will show me greater respect because of it.”

I told her, “That I don’t doubt.”

The guerrillas had crossed the river in what she called an obada, a large dugout canoe that looked to have been hollowed out using fire and an ax. It was pulled up on the bank, hidden among bushes.

“The sun will be above the trees in an hour or two,” she said. “We must get as far down the river as we can. The dead men have friends only an hour’s walk from here. A military camp. They will soon be looking for us. If they find us, they will shoot us.”

I told her, “I need to get to a telephone. It’s very important. Or a highway where I can flag down a car and get help. I have to hurry. Friends of mine, their lives depend on it.”

“The soldiers control the only road. There are many of them. You can’t help your friends if you are dead. We must go by river.”

“Is there a telephone in your village?”

The slightest hint of a smile came into her voice. “If there were a telephone in my village, I would find a new village.”

That morning, just after 6:30 A.M., the river was slowly transformed from water, to clay, and then molten wax. Then it became a tunnelway of brass streaked with golden mist. Overhead, the sky absorbed the river’s incandescence and mirrored the gradual evolutions of color and light.

We were deep in a ravine of vine and leaf, two human specks riding a vein of silver. The forest walls were sheer as rock cliffs, matted with wildflowers and shadows, but hollow, alive inside.

I was in the front of the canoe because the girl refused to let me take the stern, even though I insisted that I was very experienced in boats.

“All men say that they know boats,” she told me. “I have been building and paddling obadas all my life. Can you make such a claim?”

She was a superb paddler, no denying that. No wasted effort, no unnecessary ruddering, and she could steer a straight line, too.

So I concentrated on paddling. Hard. For the first hour, we exchanged only a few words. With the aid of the river’s steady current, we probably put seven or eight miles between us and the crash site.

Finally, Keesha stopped us, saying, “I have to make water.”

I turned to see her standing nearly naked behind me, the blue skirt in her hand, brown thighs paler than her legs, the thin strip of pubic hair very dark. There was no shyness as she squatted over the side and urinated.

As she peed, she said, “If you need to make water, this is a good time.”

So I stood, feet spread wide for balance, and did, feeling her eyes on me. There was no coyness in her. She was curious, wanted to look, and so she did. Unused to an audience, I took longer than usual to relax my bladder, and that seemed to amuse her.

As we resumed paddling, she became more talkative. The guerrillas, she said, captured her more than a month before. She’d been with her older brother, whom they shot, but she didn’t know if he was dead or not, because he’d fallen into the river.

“He will be in my village,” she said, “if he’s alive. I hope he is there. I have seven brothers and sisters, but he is my favorite. His name is Bixa, though we call him Zarabatana, because of his skill at using a pucuna.”

I said, “A pucuna?”

“What you call a blowgun. He is an excellent hunter.”

Keesha told me that the guerrillas had used her as a slave, made her cook and clean for them, and also shared her body in bed. She’d tried to escape twice, but the guerrillas caught her and turned her over to black-beard for punishment. He’d beaten her as he raped her.

“I came to learn that it was his way,” she said. “It was the only way he could perform as a man. He had me often, and so I was beaten many times.”

“Not as a man,” I corrected her. “That’s not what men do.”

“Perhaps. But it has created a problem I did not anticipate, and caused me much fear. As soon as I get to a village, I must speak to the curandeira, the old woman who makes medicines.”