Deadly Journey (21 page)

Chapter 35

Return Journey

Inside the
community hall, two of the men helped Carlos to his feet. Boat Boy handed him a
crutch that he’d fashioned from a branch with the fork as an armrest and helped
him to settle it under his good armpit. Carlos grimaced as he took his first
step and then another.

‘Wouldn’t you be better off using the
stretcher to rest?’ I asked.

‘No, it wouldn’t fit in the dinghy. Please,
just make sure I don’t fall on the way outside. I need to make it to the bench
next to the entrance.’

Slowly he made his way outside. His teeth
gritted with every step, but the nature of the man didn’t groan. Pure grit and
determination got him to the bench. He removed the crutch and with some skilful
hopping, he manoeuvred to sit.

‘I’m surprised you two came back. I thought
you’d have taken a boat and gone up river,’ he said.

‘What, and get ambushed by Indians? No
thanks. I made you a promise and I’ll stick to it. Besides, you left us a
weapon back there
–
thanks.’

‘I still reckon I owe you one, even though
under threat, you promised me you wouldn’t escape.’

‘I may just have to take you up on that.
When are we due to get the dinghy?’

‘An hour, maybe less.’

‘How’s the leg?’

‘Stiff. But maybe that’s me not wanting to
bend it just in case the stitches come apart and the wound opens.’

‘No chance of that. The bandage will hold
it good and tight. Wait, what stitches?’

‘When you were sleeping, one of the women
removed the bandage and stitched the spear wound with a fish bone and some
kapok floss, spun into a thread.’

‘That’s some tree they have. They should
call it the tree of life.’

He opened the flap of his pants to reveal
the stitches. The wound was stained with the same green and purple slime the
shaman had spit on the arrow wound in his shoulder.

‘You’d be surprised at some of the other
uses of the kapok tree. The Indians use the trunks to fashion their boats. They
trade the floss from the seeds for use in life belts on account of its
buoyancy. So yeah, it should be called the tree of life.’

I’d never really considered the lives of
indigenous Indians before, other than to think of the rainforest tribes as
savages. Why, I don’t know. Unless it was the tales I heard as a child of them
killing their enemies and shrinking their heads to carry as trophies. But seeing
them surviving in their natural habitat, in what we would consider a primitive
life, they were flourishing and on the face of it happy with their lot. I just
felt sorry for them that the
cocaleros
and the loggers were upsetting
the delicate balance of all around them.

Taking the combat knife from my belt, I
turned to Carlos. ‘Let me cut away the flap from your pants. It’ll make it
easier to walk and save you from tripping.’

Carlos nodded. I cut away the surplus
material and handed him his knife.

‘No, you keep it until we get on the dingy,
same with the other weapons. I doubt I could use them if I needed them. Listen,
you know when we get to the villa I’ll have to shackle you until you get to
your room.’

‘Don’t worry about it, I know.’

‘I’m not worried.’ He shuffled his butt on
the bench. ‘Kurt, I have to tell you that you should be worried. Perez is
unpredictable.’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen.’

I couldn’t be sure if he knew something
that Perez had planned, but his expression told me he was fighting a battle not
to spell it out to me. We had clearly bonded, man-to-man. Still, I couldn’t
help thinking that if ordered to do so, he would take my life. The only
consolation to that thought
–
however macabre
–
was that he wouldn’t let me suffer.

Carlos said, ‘I suppose you’ve thought
about taking over the trawler and setting a course for the U.S.?’

His question had me sitting upright.

‘Are you suggesting that’s what I should
do?’

‘Well, is that what you’ve thought of
doing?’

‘Yeah, I’ve thought about it, but like you,
they know where my nearest and dearest live.’

‘I guess we’re all held for ransom one way
or another,’ he said.

‘Yup, that’s about the size of it.’

I hadn’t seen a radio on board the trawler,
but there must have been one in the captain’s cabin. If the captain managed to
get a signal to Perez before I isolated and took control of the cabin, my
family could be toast. Then there was the problem of Leandra needing to get
back to the villa. I wasn’t giving up on the idea, if only to get a message to
my family. But then if I alerted the coast guard in South America to get a
message to them, how would I know whether or not Perez had the coast guard in
his pocket? Whichever way I looked at it, I kept getting snared. Perez was the
key. Only taking him out of the equation would prevent him from declaring
checkmate, but there was no chance of that happening.

Leandra joined us and sat next to me. ‘What
have you boys been talking about?’ she asked.

‘Just saying, we’ll be heading back to the
villa soon.’

Boat Boy walked up to Leandra and they
exchanged words.

‘Looks like we’re going now,’ said Leandra.
‘I’ll get your backpack, Carlos.’

Two of the Indians picked Carlos up bodily
and set off walking.

Safely on the
long boat, we returned the way we came. The dingy was waiting and along with
the crew, we helped Carlos get on board the craft. The crew didn’t even
question that I had the rifle. All the same, I laid it at Carlos’s side and
slipped his knife back in his belt.

The return trip to the trawler proved
uneventful, same as the journey on the biplane over the ocean and then the
trawler back to the villa. Try as I might, there wasn’t an opportunity to get
inside the captain’s cabin, so all of my worrying had been for nothing. It
didn’t help that although they weren’t armed with guns, all the crew carried
knives for gutting the fish.

The only refreshing part of the journey was
that Carlos didn’t order either of us to be shackled. All that changed as the
captain called for us to get in the dinghy, although I was the only one put in
chains.

Lowered into the dinghy and into the swell
of the Pacific, I became anxious. Cold inside, my body shivered in waves, yet
sweat formed on my brow and my hands were clammy. On the beach, I could see a
vehicle waiting for our arrival. No one spoke on the journey until we landed on
the beach. Guards greeted us, assisting Carlos out of the dinghy, taking him to
one side and whispering to him. The crew helped Leandra and then me onto the
sand. Carlos walked with a limp, but at least he could manage it without the
crutch. The three of us climbed into the vehicle, sat on the back seat and we
headed for the villa.

‘It’s ten a.m.,’ said Carlos. ‘Perez is on
his way in the mini-sub to deal with the Cobra insurgents.’

‘You mean they have them alive?’ I asked.

‘They’ll have been interrogating them for
information.’

I shuddered at the thought. I doubted
they’d have bothered with CIA type interrogations.

The crop duster flew overhead and came in
to land. Insurgents or no insurgents, it was business as usual for the flow of
money and drugs. I was ordered out of the vehicle, with Leandra following.
Carlos stayed inside and held the door open.

‘I’m going to the barracks. I’d stay in
your bedroom if I were you and keep out of the way of Perez,’ he said and then
pulled the door closed.

The vehicle drove away, leaving a guard to
escort us to our bedrooms. Staring at the vehicle as it headed down the drive,
I dwelt on Carlos’s words and manner of delivery. His ominous tone made me
wonder just what the guards had whispered to him.

‘I’ll take a shower and change,’ Leandra
said, ‘then I’ll make breakfast and come to your room.’

Arriving back was something of an
anti-climax. Nothing seemed to have changed until I shuffled into the bedroom.
The television had been removed. The guard had me lie face down on the bed. He
clasped the ankle tracker into place and removed my shackles. Leandra stepped
into the room as the guard opened the French doors. He walked out of the room
and Leandra closed the door behind him.

‘My television has been removed.’

‘Yeah, mine too.’

Leandra twirled to look at the space
vacated by my television. It set me thinking why they would remove them. The
only thing I could come up with was that there was news they didn’t want me to
see.

Leandra whispered, ‘I still have Carlos’s
pistol in my backpack. Well, I did have. I’ve hidden it under my pillow.’

‘What? He must have known we hadn’t given
it to him.’ I recalled Carlos saying that he owed me one, but I hadn’t expected
him to act voluntarily. ‘That reminds me, do you still have the GPS transmitter
in your pocket?’

‘Yes, if you mean that contraption in the
plastic bag?’

I couldn’t think what use it would be as it
was only a transmitter with a pre-programmed auto-dial to Stony’s receiver.
Still, I thought it would be worth keeping.

‘Look, don’t hand it to me now, but after
you’ve showered and made breakfast, get the gun and the transmitter to me
wrapped in some towels or something. Are you okay with that?’

‘Sure. Have you checked to see if the guard
uniform is still in the closet?’

‘No.’

‘Quickly, take off your boots and hand them
to me.’

Slipping off my boots, I handed them to
her. She turned and opened the closet door and placed them inside. My body
shook as she twitched the pile of sheets hiding the uniform and then closed the
door.

Leandra sighed. ‘Praise be to God. It’s
still there. Listen, I’m going, back soon.’

She opened the door, walked out, and closed
the door behind her.

The sound of an engine and tyres crunching
the gravel outside distracted me. Doors slammed and voices were barking orders.

Hurrying over to the French doors, I peered
outside. A guard opened the rear doors of a truck. A group of men huddled
inside. One at a time, two guards dragged them out as other guards joined in to
line up the men on the drive. Their hands were clasped behind their backs with
short ropes secured to leg irons. The guards forced them to kneel. I counted
twenty-two in all, but I could see another lifeless pile of bodies still in the
back of the truck.

Some of the men groaned, some cried and
others looked straight ahead, expressionless. All of them had bloodied faces
and bloodstained T-shirts. Perez appeared from the maze with two guards
carrying canvas bags. I stepped back and pulled the net curtain to hide from
view. The guards with the bags walked on into the villa. Perez marched up and
down the line of prisoners, ranting, his words inaudible, carried along with
the breeze out to sea.

Perez reached underneath his jacket and
drew his pistol. A gunshot echoed. The bullet passed through from the front of
the prisoner’s skull, exiting along with a mist of brain cells, and he keeled
over. Perez hadn’t even afforded him the luxury of an unseen bullet from
behind. Looking through the nets was like watching a movie from World War II
unfold as he walked down the line dispatching each prisoner in the same style.
He reached the last of the prisoners and shot him in each leg in turn, then in
his arms. The prisoner rolled onto his side, screaming. Frozen where I stood, I
was strangely detached from the events.

Perez knelt at the man’s side, opened his
mouth, forced the barrel inside, and fired. Then he stood and fired more shots
into the prisoner’s body until he ran out of ammunition. Slipping his gun back
in his waistband, he turned and marched into the villa.

The horror I had witnessed had me wishing I
were still in the rainforest. The pit of my stomach tightened and I retched.
Rushing to the bathroom, I threw up the contents of my stomach down the toilet.

I picked up the bar of soap. Stuck to the
back of it was a piece of paper. I turned it over to find a smudged message.

‘You’re going to die tomorrow’ it read. I
scraped the paper off the bar of soap with my fingernails, then dropped the
message into the toilet and pressed the flush. The message couldn’t have come
from Carlos. I grasped the washbasin with both hands, my knuckles turning
white. There wasn’t time to consider who could have left the warning. I
couldn’t even be sure if it was some sick psychological joke.

I heard the door to my room open.

‘Kurt, where are you?’ Leandra called out.

‘In here.’

Leandra’s ashen face appeared around the
doorframe as I turned the tap and cupped my hands under the water at the
washbasin. She rushed up to me, tears streaming down her cheeks, and flung her
arms around me. I turned off the tap water and dried my hands.

‘Did... did you see what just happened
outside?’ Leandra asked.