Kidnapped and a Daring Escape (15 page)

    
They do, sitting close to the fire for warmth, alternating spoonful on
spoonful. In fact, she takes over and feeds both of them. While they eat,
he tells her about how he evaded getting drugged and the planning and
execution of the jump from the cliff.

    
"But that was crazy," she interrupts him. "You could have killed
yourself. It seems foolish enough to cliff jump with a parachute, but
without …?"

    
"Maybe you’ll think differently, after I’ve taken you tandem parachuting out of a plane and you experience the thrill of gliding in free fall."

    
"Oh, I would never dare."

    
"You will, Bianca, you will," he says smiling.

    
He seems to be so certain about it, but how could he. She doubts that
Franco would allow her to do such a dangerous thing, nor does she think
that she would have the courage for it.

    
He takes up his tale of how he tracked them and then scouted out the
settlement.

    
"I was there again yesterday at dusk," he continues. "I wore the
clothing of the dead guy, hoping that his smell would confuse the dogs
enough so they’d not raise the alarm. I put on every piece of clothing he
had, his gloves, his parka, his smelly socks stuck into the sleeves, and I
had his bandanna wrapped over my mouth and nose. Everything so that
his odor would conceal mine."

    
"And they were really fooled?" she asks.

    
"Yes, they were. I must admit, I was frightened it might not work, but
they only growled a bit as I approached and held the gloves under their
noses. I planned to free you after everybody went to sleep. But when I
saw the guy take you to the big house, I knew there was trouble, that I
had to get you out of there quickly. That’s when I appeased the dogs, so
to speak, by offering them the goat I had killed earlier. I really hated
killing that poor animal."

    
"How did you?" she asks, curious, but at the same time already
repelled by the likely answer.

    
"I broke its neck. So it was quick. Then opened up its belly and let the
dogs have it. The guy in the kitchen was still cleaning up and opened the
door when I knocked. He offered no resistance when he saw the gun
pointing at him. The rest you know."

    
She nods, blushing again that he caught her half-naked in front of that
vile man. He must have guessed her thoughts and smiles.

    
"Bianca, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. And besides, you’re a
gorgeous woman."

    
She blushes even more. He has such a direct way of talking, never
beating about the bush, goes through her mind.

    
"I haven’t thanked you yet for coming to my rescue."

    
"Then don’t. I did it as much for myself as for you. And in case you
still don’t believe it, I’ll say it out loud … I love you. I think I fell in love
with you when I spotted you on the dance floor, and you smiled up to me.
But don’t be afraid. I’ll not act on it."

    
She lowers her head, certain that he means it, but not knowing what
to think, how to respond. No man has ever told her that he loves her in
such a matter of fact voice, as if he were talking about the weather. In
fact, only one man ever said the words ‘I love you’ to her. The guys she
dated before Franco might have said ‘I want you’. Franco whispered
several times, on special occasions, that he was fond of her. But ‘
ti amo
’,
the form young people like her nowadays expect from a lover, he said
only once in the almost two years they have been dating, and that was
when they made love the first time.

    
To overcome her embarrassment she asks: "Why did you substitute
the guns? Isn’t the machine gun more powerful than the rifle you took?"

    
"It is for close engagements, but not for shooting at distant targets.
Not accurate enough. The rifle is. And I’ve no intention of getting into
a close fight."

    
"Oh, I hope we’ll manage to get to safety without a fight. They’ll kill
us if they catch up with us." She fervently wishes that they will be able
to outrun them, to lose them, and then get the protection of the police.

    
"Yes, if they get us, they’ll kill me. That’s for sure, but not you. You
are only worth something if you are alive. But they’ll first have to get us.
Only five of them can take up the pursuit.
El commandante
won’t walk
for weeks and he’ll want somebody around to serve him. That leaves four
and they’ll not be as desperate as I am."

    
How can he talk about death like this? She senses that it isn’t bravado,
but that he is utterly serious. "Aren’t you afraid of dying?" she murmurs.

    
"That’s a hard question to answer. I don’t know what I will feel when
the moment comes, but thinking about it right now, no I’m not afraid. I’ll
fight with all the means I have at my disposal and that isn’t just weapons."

    
Yes, she muses, he has just proven that last bit by snatching me away
from amidst six well-armed, callous guerrillas and two guard dogs
without a single person getting hurt, except
el commandante
, and even
that wasn’t necessary. She feels he did it more out of revenge or maybe
to prevent him from leading the pursuit. To her, André is such a
confusing, unpredictable man. She still doesn’t have the measure of him.
All she knows is that she wants to trust him and that he seems to know
what he is doing.

* * *

After the meal, André cleans the pot in a nearby puddle. He sees Bianca
disappear behind a boulder and assumes that she went there to relieve
herself. When she returns, she carries the extra clothing she wore during
the night and stows it in the pack.

    
The sun is breaking through the clouds when they take off again. He
welcomes its warmth. It will help dry out their clothing. Everything is
slightly humid from the dew. The cartographic map he stole shows that
the grasslands are on the spine of the mountain chain he intends to cross.
Furthermore, he does not necessarily want to continue on the track which
the map shows will veer southwest. He would prefer to keep straight
west. But for that he needs to learn more about the lay of the land, details
that are difficult to assess from the map. So he aims for a pronounced
ridge a bit to the northwest that rises about six hundred feet above the
superpàramo
. The side facing them consists mainly of loose rocks and
shingle, making the ascent difficult.

    
By the time they reach the ridge, they are hot. Both have removed their
jackets. André scans the land beyond the ridge with the binoculars,
comparing what he sees with the map. He guesses the deep valleys shown
on the map in the northwest. The terrain is shades of gray and brown —
difficult wasteland, he reckons, offering no protection, hot during the
day, cold at night. Straight west extends a rounded ridge that forms the
watershed between the Rio Patïa flowing into the Pacific and the Caqueta
emptying into the Amazon. To its north the terrain forms a broken up
bowl sloping down toward the wasteland to the north, while to the south
lies another shallow basin with clouds hugging the wooded slopes, so
typical for this region. His map shows a little lake below that ridge as one
of the sources of the Caqueta River. The track they have followed skirts
past that lake south and dipping into the basin. It ultimately connects to
the road from Santa Rosa to San Sebastian where that road makes a big
loop east around the chain of mountains that forms the western boundary
of the basin. Distance-wise it is much shorter to join that road by
following the ridge. But is that wise? The terrain could be difficult, slow
going, and they might get lost in the cloud forest that closes off any vistas
into the distance. Reluctantly, he decides to stick to the track, at least for
another while.

    
He turns back east to discover the route of the track and the best way
to join it again. A split-second flash of reflected sun catches his eye. In
the multitude of frailejones it takes him a while before he spots four men
approach last night’s campsite. Two dogs run ahead of them, occasionally stopping and waiting for the men to catch up.

6

"Our friends are already on our heels," André tells Bianca. "Crouch down
so they can’t see us." He pulls her behind the nearest sizable boulder.

    
"Shouldn’t we run and try to get away from them?" Her voice sounds
anxious.

    
"No, they’re faster than us and they’ve the dogs. There’s no way to
lose them. I should have killed these damned beasts instead of the goat.
Right now, all we can do is sit tight and see where they go. If they follow
the track, we wait until noon to see what happens, and if they don’t return
we strike out west along the ridge, although I don’t like taking that
route."

    
"Why not?"

    
"Because it may be treacherous."

    
"And if they return?"

    
"Then we do the same as if they had come straight to us."

    
"You are talking in riddles."

    
"No. My first ‘if’ implied another choice for them, namely letting the
nose of the dogs guide them to us directly."

    
"And if they do that?" she exclaims alarmed.

    
"Then I’ll find out if my aim is still as good as it was two years ago."

    
"What do you mean?"

    
"I’ll shoot them when they’re still about two to three hundred yards
away. I have the advantage. I can shoot from above. And you stay firmly
hidden behind this boulder. Promise?"

    
"Yes. Oh, André, I’m frightened."

    
He hugs her shoulder. "It’s all right to be frightened. It’s natural.
Look, Bianca, I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to stop them if they come.
They don’t know that somebody is waiting for them. Fugitives run as fast
and as far as they can. They rarely stop to fight back. These guys might
not even have noticed that I stole their high-powered rifle. That’s why I
put the AK47 in its place."

    
"You mean you thought of that already then?"

    
"Yes, that’s what I meant when I said I will use all means at my
disposal and the most powerful of those is the brain, don’t you agree."

    
He smiles at her and she responds with a fleeting, anxious smile.

    
He now crawls back to a vantage point between two boulders where
he can see their old campsite and the approach over the
superpàramo
to
the ridge. The group has discovered the site too. Watching them through
the binoculars, he observes one guy poke a stick into the ashes he doused
before they left, he guesses to check whether it is recent. They are not
carrying any packs, just their AK47s. That’s why they caught up so fast,
he concludes. They look around and watch their dogs circle the site,
sniffing the ground. Suddenly, one dog takes off in the direction of the
ridge. The other follows quickly. The group of four jogs after them. In
only a few minutes they get to the bottom of the scree slope where the
grass tufts peter out and no place to hide remains. That is the spot André
has chosen to stop them.

    
Although he tried to sound confident when he reassured Bianca a few
minutes ago, he does not like what he may have to do next. He may have
to kill. It is too dicey to try injuring them only. At a distance of two to
three hundred yards, he has to target the chest, and that could kill.

    
He has the man in front in the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight and
pulls the trigger. The man falls. Probably before he hears the retort of the
weapon, André reckons, as he ejects the spent cartridge and takes aim
again. The other three are now in disarray, running away in different
direction in the shelterless terrain. His second bullet hits the one who
seeks shelter in the scree slope.

    
The dogs are still racing uphill. He now aims at the one in front,
tracking him and pulls the trigger through. The dog yelps and tumbles
down the scree before smashing into a large rock. It takes two shots to
stop the second. There is still one bullet left in the magazine. He quickly
pushes in five more from the top to have a full magazine of six. Then he
waits.