The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (28 page)

This was the man Kate preferred to me? I was no great catch. I knew that. But this was the competition? I put my hands in the air and considered my options.

Hmm. There weren’t any. I wondered what I’d say to Pitt if there really was an afterlife. What I’d say to Lili.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have flushed.”

Aurora trudged through the sand, around Victor, up the gravel rise to the main street of the tiny village. Victor’s gun wavered between my nose and her buttocks. “Come back here!” he shouted. “I’ll shoot!”

“Go ahead, for all I care,” Aurora said.

“Hey,” I said, “that’s my line.”

She rounded the corner and stopped. She swayed on her feet. Fell to her knees. “Oh my God,” she said. She covered her face with her hands. “This is real. This is happening.”

“What is?” I asked.

But all she said was, “Who could do such a thing?”

“Do what?”

“As if you have to ask,” Victor sneered. He put both hands on the gun, as though willing himself to shoot, but unable to do so.

“Before you kill me,” I said, “let me find out what I did?”

He jerked the gun, motioning me toward Aurora. I climbed the gravel embankment and joined her in a front-row seat to an oozing pile of dead bodies.

A realtor would have said the houses were ready for new occupants, as long as you didn’t mind the bullet holes in the exterior wood paneling, or the shattered glass. And hey, blood comes out with just a little elbow grease, right? But really, sorry, hey, the corpses of the previous tenants have to go. Maggoty cadavers lower property values for everyone, not just you.

Whoever had done it had not been satisfied with merely massacring everyone in sight. No. They had to stack the bodies in a pile taller than me. Blood and piss formed puddles on the hard-packed earth. Orange-and-scarlet robes mixed with denim. A toothless mouth gaped at me upside down, and I knew the old fisherman’s net would never be fully mended. The little boy, the one who’d crashed into me, he was there too, eyes missing from their sockets, Bolivia’s hopes for the World Cup now dashed. Echo’s pregnant belly sagged amidst the carnage, one less angry volunteer for the Lima office. I picked up a red baseball cap, and half an eyeball plopped onto my shoe. I dropped the cap on the ground. I wondered if Kate was buried somewhere in the mess.

“It was you,” Victor said. His breath came in snorts and gulps, his nostrils vibrating. “You. And him. Michael.” He kicked a corpse on the ground, separating it from the main pile. He flipped it over with his toe. It was the talkative monk/volunteer/freakazoid from the night before. The auto-flagellating weirdo. The back of his head was missing.

“Why would he do such a thing?” I asked.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

“You know the dead guy?” Aurora asked me.

“I ate dinner with him last night. He said all of a dozen words before whipping himself with barbed wire.”

“He was CIA!” Victor raged. “Had to be. Or why did he do all this?”

“So what happened?” Aurora asked. “All of a sudden he just started shooting?”

“Pretty much.” He wiped the sweat from his palms against his sweater, one at a time, but kept the gun pointed at my chest. He said, “We were loading the boats. Preparing to flee. We expected American aggression.” He spat. “Michael had a gun.” He looked at the weapon in his hand. “This gun. Just started killing people. Clip after clip after clip. Men. Women. Children.”

I swallowed. “Kate?”

“How convenient,” he sneered. “I told you. Kate got away. A boatload left this morning, before you got up. Crossed the lake, took a jeep into the mountains.”

“And you think I had something to do with this.”

“I know you fucking did!” he shouted, his wet combover slapping against his right shoulder, his scalp pink in the late-morning sun.

“I know you did,” he said again. His lips curled inward in a face-puckering howl. His shoulders shook. The gun rattled in his hands. “And now you’ll get your fucking war.”

“Wait a second. What war?” Aurora held her palm in front of the gun barrel. “And how do you know it was this guy?” She jerked a thumb in my direction. “What was your name again?”

“Horace,” I said. “But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”

She giggled. “Really? Like cloppity-clippity-clop, ride off into the sunset?”

“More like pulling heavy loads until you lie down at the side of the road and they shoot you. But close,” I said.

Victor stepped between us, pointed the gun at her, then at me, back and forth, as though confused who to kill. “You murder dozens of innocent people, and you stand here talking about ponies?”

Aurora held up her hands again. “We had nothing to do with this. And Horse has been on the island all morning.”

“Of course he was,” Victor said. “All he did was lead them here so they could kill us all.”

“But you just said the dead guy, Michael was it? Was CIA. How long has he been here for?” she asked.

Victor’s combover trembled. “Months. Three months. Three and a half.”

“So they already knew you were here. Since ages ago. So what exactly is Horse guilty of?”

The gun trembled in his hand. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. Both of you. You’re part of it too. I can tell.” He pointed the gun at her, then at me. Aimed at my head. His eyes narrowed, like he was about to pull the trigger.

My body moved on autopilot. I smacked my fist down on the gun with one hand, slapped Victor across the face with the other. He let go of the gun. I picked it off the ground.

“I feel the same,” I said. He continued to convulse. I slapped him again. “It will not do you any good. You understand?”

He cringed on the ground, covered his face with his forearms, hands flat on his scalp. “Do it quick and get it over with.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I said. “We’re not going to kill you. Will you snap out of it?”

“He’s in shock,” Aurora said. “Give him some time.”

“We haven’t got time,” I said. I flicked the gun into the lake. It splashed in the water and disappeared.

“Happy now?” I asked.

He peeked between his wrists. “You’re not? Going to kill me, I mean?”

“Why would I want to kill you?” I asked him. I held out my hand. “Come on. Get up. Be a man.”

He took my hand and I heaved him to his feet. He gaped at me. Glanced over his shoulders, as though expecting an assault.

“Are there others?” I asked him. “The ones who did this?”

“No,” he said. “Just Michael.”

I looked at Aurora. She shrugged. “Other survivors, maybe?” I asked.

Victor shook his head. “No one,” he stuttered. “No one left. No one.”

“How did you survive?”

He went limp. He flopped back on the ground, arms slapping against the sand. “I was taking a shit,” he wailed. He looked up. “Too much coffee,” he added, pleading for understanding.

“I thought you drank tea,” I said.

He held out his open palms. His face contorted in sorrow. “Fifty people just got murdered and you’re worried about what I drink with breakfast?”

“So you heard gunfire,” Aurora suggested.

He twisted his limp arms in circles, a woebegone duck.

“Why didn’t the monks fight back?” I squatted next to him. “They all had guns. AK-47s, it looked like. Shotguns, too.”

“They tried.” He raked his combover back onto his scalp. It lay in thick clumps across his naked pate. “They are not warriors. They are not soldiers. Most don’t even know how to use a rifle. Never even pulled the trigger. The bullets we gave them were blanks.”

“Then what’d you give them guns for, for heaven’s sake?” Aurora said.

“The lake pirates.” He waved a limp wrist at the water. “Prey on the villagers. It was for show, don’t you see? Not to actually be used, not against…” He shrugged, left the thought unfinished.

I stood, kicked the bottom of Michael’s boot. “It was just him, then. No one else. He did all this.”

A miserable nod. “Yes.”

Aurora asked, “Any idea why he started shooting?”

Victor snorted a long strand of bloody mucus back up his nose. “The Americans destroy dissent. So much as a peep and the Dissent Suppression Unit will kill you. The things Pitt told me…” He lowered his chin. “Pitt’s dead, isn’t he.”

I nodded. “Saw the body myself.” The smell of his burnt flesh even now lingered deep in my sinuses.

“See?” Victor said. “The Americans will have their war.” The hectoring professor slashed the air from his muddy lectern. “Cover up the inconvenient truth. What’s a few dead volunteers in exchange for some cheap lithium?” He laughed, a bitter bark. “Hell, if I hadn’t been taking a crap, he’d have got away with it. Saunter out of here on a boat, report back to headquarters. Get a medal for it, I expect.”

“What war is he talking about?” Aurora asked me.

I said, “The US is trying to steal the lithium fields in the
altiplano
from Bolivia.”

“Is that why Sven died?”

“Yes.”

Victor and I looked away. We stood in silence for a long moment. We watched the bodies, hoping for signs of movement, knowing there would be none. Buzzards circled overhead. Flies drifted in waves from the corpses, sampled our faces, rejected us for being insufficiently dead.

Aurora strode off toward the boat.

“Where you going?” I called after her.

“We got a war to stop, don’t we?”

Twenty

Aurora said, “I think we got a problem.”

I heaved a cardboard box of canned spinach into the boat, pushed it snug against a twenty-gallon bottle of water. It was all we could salvage from the cave. What a great meal that was going to make.

“What’s that?”

A high-pitched whistling noise split the air. She held up her index finger: Exhibit A, Your Honor. Across the water, two Bolivian warships chugged toward us. Half a dozen more approached on the horizon. I felt like a deer crossing a highway at rush hour, doomed to watch death approach, unable to look away.

The explosion roared in my ears. The sand beneath my feet shifted sideways and I fell to my knees. Pebbles rained on our heads. A crater gaped just outside the cave.

“Where’s Victor?” I shouted.

“Gone back for his laptop!”

Another whistling noise overhead.
This is no time to sit around waiting to die,
I told myself.
Revenge waits for no man.

“Get down!”

We threw ourselves face first on the beach. The explosion was louder this time. The sand trembled against my body. A boulder the size of a basketball landed next to my head. My ears rang. I got up on my hands and knees, peered over the top of the beach. The cave had collapsed.

Aurora took hold of the gunwale. “Get the boat in the water!”

Our legs churned sand until the icy water covered our knees. I looked back. The houses nearest the cave were in ruins. “The fuck is Victor?”

“There he is!” She pointed.

He ran toward us, his combover flopping at his shoulder, laptop under his arm. A third explosion destroyed half the village, blew him flat on his stomach, next to the pile of bodies. The laptop flew from his grip, smashed against the wall of a surviving house. He picked himself up, clawed at the innards of the computer.

“Come on!” I shouted.

Victor held up the hard drive, stumbled down the beach, through the water and dove into the boat. I tugged on the motor until it woke, and we roared away from shore. More shells whistled toward the mountain. Houses the volunteers had labored for months to build now disappeared in puffs of splinters. The medical clinic vanished. The pile of bodies evaporated. Cadaverous parts rained around us, plopping in the water beside us, flecking us with bits of toasted gore. I lowered my head against the wind, aimed the boat for the southern shore of the lake.

“They’re shelling Peru, for chrissakes. They start the war without us? Did the bomb at the mine go off early?”

“They’re not attacking Peru,” Victor said. “They’re attacking us.”

“What for? Why do they want to kill us?” Aurora asked.

“Same reason they killed Pitt. Same reason they killed your boyfriend.” Victor hurled the hard drive into the lake, and slumped into the bottom of the boat. “Michael failed in his mission. Now they have to make sure no one gets out alive.” The spray soaked his combover. He lifted the wad of hair and plastered it to his scalp, thick strands of clotted gray, like rotting coils of intestines.

“Hang on,” I said, one hand on the tiller. “Those are Bolivian ships. What are you saying, the Bolivians are working for the CIA?”

“Precisely!”

“But I thought the CIA was trying to steal the
altiplano
from the Bolivians!”

Victor shrugged, eyes half-closed. “Don’t underestimate the CIA. Probably told the Bolivians we’re terrorists or something, get them to do their dirty work.” He slumped lower into the freezing water at the bottom of the boat.

“Figure it out later,” Aurora said. “Right now, where are we going?”

I kicked Victor’s foot. “Good question!”

He shook his head, as though waking from a nightmare. All those dead bodies. I hoped the shock would wear off soon.

“Puno!” he said finally. Puno was the Peruvian border town, just opposite Copacabana on the Bolivian side.

“But there’s police in Puno,” Aurora said.

“Peruvian police,” I said.

“Peru, Bolivia, doesn’t matter. They’re all against us.” Victor pushed himself up against the bucking gunwale. “Just outside Puno.” He pointed. “There. See those trees?”

A tight copse of scrubby pines clustered next to a red barn. A giant green peace sign adorned the side of the building. I adjusted our course. We crashed across the waves, propelled by two hundred and ten horses. More shells obliterated all trace of human habitation at the ashram. Machine-gun fire cackled and flashed in the distance, aimed at us, but the trace rounds fell into the lake hundreds of meters away.

“What’s there?”

“Transportation,” he shouted. Then added, “You know, you’re lucky you got off the island alive. If you’d stayed, they’d have killed you for sure!”

The ships were closing the distance rapidly. I aimed the boat for the beach at full throttle. At the last moment I cut the engine. “Hold on!”