The DMZ Read online

  The Black Hawk circled overhead until the spray plane touched down, then settled slowly to the runway beside it. The Black Hawk’s flight crew was from Colonel Serano’s battalion—part of the U.S. government’s compromise with its own citizens that it would not send American soldiers into this combat—but a U.S. training officer was on board. As the soldiers jumped down, he came to the open side door. Hunching his shoulders in apology, he made a helpless gesture toward the cylinder shape of the huge machine gun that thrust its deadly muzzle through the door. Walking over, Colonel Thornton saw that part of the mountings had ripped loose from the floor, causing the entire weapon to slide forward toward the nose of the helicopter.

  He cursed aloud. He’d warned those idiots in Washington that this would happen. The GAU19 Gatling mini-gun was a good piece of equipment, powerful enough to penetrate the jungle and reach anything—or anyone—taking shelter under cover of its canopy. That was why it had been proposed for this job. But it was too heavy for the Black Hawk and too temperamental for an inexperienced crew—which Colonel Serano’s men certainly were. Colonel Thornton hadn’t been the only one to warn that replacing the smaller M-60s was a recipe for disaster. But the congressmen pushing the deal and certain Colombian Air Force officials shared a predilection for the bigger-and-better syndrome. It was nice to be able to say “I told you so,” but the deaths of a lot of good men wasn’t the way Colonel Thornton liked to be proved right.

  Bill Shidler had his people on board the DC4. Colonel Thornton could see the political officer standing in the open doorway as the portable stairway was pulled away. The colonel made no effort to see off his unwelcome guests. He’d be meeting them again soon enough. He snapped a few orders into his hand radio, and after a moment saw the DC4 begin taxiing down the runway. The rest of their trip should be uneventful.

  He would have to make an immediate report on today’s fiasco, but Colonel Thornton didn’t head directly back to his office. Walking across to where a neat lawn swept down to the perimeter fence (there were advantages to having an entire base of young, strong arms to keep occupied), the JTF commander studied with narrowed eyes the tangle of trees and vines not far beyond that marked the edge of the jungle.

  They were out there—his enemies. Laughing up their camouflaged sleeves, no doubt. Farclandia. That’s what the locals called it. Forty-two thousand square kilometers of jungle and rivers and plains where the guerrillas reigned supreme—though their territorial kingdom was actually many times that, since the FARC’s long arm of terror, kidnapping, and murder reached far beyond the borders of the demilitarized zone. Colonel Thornton had been only one of many American and Colombian advisors who protested bitterly against former President Pastrana’s decision to hand over a major chunk of Colombian territory without so much as a fight.

  Give the guerrillas an inch, he’d written in an angry memo, and they’ll never hand it meekly back—or sue for peace. They will push and push and push until that inch stretches to a mile.

  And he, like others, had been right. Pastrana had sworn that his initial troop withdrawal would not extend beyond a three-month trial period. Three years later, the FARC was firmly entrenched in what they clearly considered a permanent territorial concession. Nor had they returned that concession with the slightest serious peace gesture. The zona de despeje‚ the DMZ was referred to in Spanish. It was an aviation term, meaning the “takeoff zone.” And that’s exactly what it had become for the FARC—a launching pad for their attacks on unarmed civilians and scattered, undermanned military outposts.

  Colonel Thornton turned his morose gaze from the jungle to the base itself. It looked neat and trim, with gleaming asphalt, freshly painted buildings, and whitewashed stones that bordered every path, all clean and bright under the noon sun. Beyond his own command post were the headquarters and barracks of the Colombian counter-narcotics police who shared this end of the base with the Americans. At the far end of the base, in front of their own barracks, a squadron of Colonel Serano’s latest recruits were wheeling in smart formation.

  It was a far cry from the dusty airstrip that he had first seen here in San José, and he could claim credit for the changes as much as anyone. He had been one of the first American training instructors, one of the principal voices who’d lobbied for a radar station in the zone and for increased U.S. aid to combat what was, after all, primarily an American problem. He’d returned to San José time and again on TDY, each time at a higher rank, and just last year had been appointed Joint Task Force commander of U.S. operations here.

  Theoretically, of course, he was under the jurisdiction of the Colombian base commander, Colonel Serano, and after him, the head of the Colombian counter-narcotics police, Colonel Atiencia. But President Batallano listened to Washington, and so Serano and Atiencia listened to him. Under his charge were dozens of American advisors, technicians, and pilots, as well as the usual DEA and CIA task forces, who weren’t strictly under his command but shared the facilities.

  At the moment, he also had a full TDY contingent of Special Forces. All were members of the Special Operations 7th Group based out of Fort Bragg—known to popular fiction as the Green Berets, though that was not their official title. They had been handpicked for their Spanish language proficiency and trained in a wide variety of special skills needed for jungle warfare instruction.

  And an occasional other task as well.

  The Colombian soldiers they were training had few of their own combat skills or training. But they were proving eager to learn—spurred on, perhaps, even more than their North American counterparts by the brutal reality of warfare in which they and their families lived. If they did not yet measure up to their instructors, they were now more than ready, in Colonel Thornton’s expert opinion, to kick some respect into their adversaries lurking in the jungle.

  Still, against that enormous swathe of territory out there, all of San José was but a dot on a satellite map. As that reporter woman Julie Baker had pointed out, they hadn’t yet managed to even dent the spread of coca into the rainforest, much less patrol that huge territory for drug traffic.

  If the colonel didn’t sigh as he started back toward headquarters, it was only because he considered that pessimistic gesture unseemly for a soldier. Colonel Jeff T. Thornton, scion of three generations of U.S. Army officers who had fought in every American conflict from World War I to the present, believed in his mission. The coca out there in those fields and the cocaine that was its final product were poisoning millions of young people around the world. The people taking up arms to defend that crop were criminals and the aggressors in this war, and if they wandered into the path of return fire while attempting to shoot down those unarmed crop dusters, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

  But that wasn’t the only reason he believed in this mission. He liked the Colombian people, liked their grit and resilience and even the independence that made so many of them squawk at his government’s interference in their problems. He didn’t blame them. No one liked a handout, even when they needed one. Colonel Thornton had the deepest admiration for the Colombians at all levels of society who had made a stand against corruption and narco-dealing, often at the cost of their own lives.

  These people deserved better. The campesinos out there. The political and civic leaders—and there were plenty of them—who really wanted the best for their country. The war-weary ordinary citizens. Even the guerrillas, whose tactics he certainly couldn’t condone, but who had a legitimate gripe as to the disparity between the handful of oligarchs and wealthy landowners who controlled the country’s treasure-house of resources and the masses who went without. All of them deserved better than year after year after year of futile and unending conflict.

  Or even worse, an expansion of Farclandia, with its totalitarian, repressive regime, to the rest of the country. The United States was supposed to be in the business of supporting democracy, and Colombia, whatever its problems, was a democracy and a loyal ally of the United States for decades.
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  Yes, Colonel Jeff Thornton believed in his mission. But he wasn’t as confident as he’d tried to sound while talking to that reporter in his office. Theoretically, the whole thing was simple: Destroy the coca crops that were the power base not only for the guerrillas but also for the paramilitaries and the narcos. Give the campesinos a fair shake with land reform. Then everyone could shake hands, go home, and take up farming or whatever they chose.

  But the United States had made that mistake in both Somalia and Yugoslavia—the naive assumption that if you poured in aid, patted the quarreling factions on the head, and begged everyone to shake hands and get along, the fighting and hating and killing would stop. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the way it worked. Not in Somalia, where he had been one of those trying to shepherd Red Cross convoys through the clashing warlords. Not in Yugoslavia.

  And not, it would seem, in Colombia.

  The problem was that it had gone on too long. Many sociologists blamed the continued conflict on la violencia‚ the civil war decades ago that had killed so many Colombians, largely campesinos. But it had begun long before that, as Colonel Thornton had found out when researching for his master’s degree in Latin American studies. It had, in fact, been going on almost since Simon Bolívar led the country to independence from Spain, from the inauguration of the two great Colombian parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives.

  The lines were firmly drawn from the beginning. The Liberals stood for federalization—absolute freedom at the local level from interference from a central government, free trade, and religious freedom from a state designated church. The Conservatives believed in a strong central government and protectionism, as well as absolute control by the state-sponsored Catholic church over education, marriage, and virtually every other aspect of national life.

  Even back then, Colombians had been passionate about their politics, and then as now, the leaders set the policies while their peasant followers were used as shock troops. The two parties had fought one bitter, bloody civil war after another, the worst being the War of a Thousand Days a century ago, leaving the country in economic and social ruin. Over the generations, every family had horror stories of fathers and brothers and cousins butchered by the other side, until political affiliation became less about ideology than loyalty to family and clan and to the “martyrs” who had died for the cause. It was popularly said that Colombians were born with party identifications attached to their umbilical cords.

  And now their descendants fought on in the paramilitaries and guerrillas. Again, it was the leaders who made the decisions while their campesino followers paid the cost. And if Batallano and the politicians of Colombia or the United States really believed the warring factions would so easily lay down their arms and go home, they had forgotten their history. Perhaps in the melting pots of the cities, the wounds of the past were easily dismissed, but in the countryside old loyalties ran deep and cruel memories were not forgotten. There was just too much history of hurt and hatred for easy forgiveness.

  Though the colonel had been long inured to the jungle’s heat, he found himself unpleasantly damp in the armpits by the time he reached his office. Stepping with relief into the cool hiss of the air-conditioning, he shut away the heated subject of Colombian politics as deliberately as he had the humid furnace of outdoors. It wasn’t his position to debate policy on American involvement in this country’s dirty little war. He’d been given a job to do. If all his side did was stamp out the drug trade that was pouring billions into the pockets of those whose interest lay in keeping this conflict alive, then maybe it would give the rest of the Colombians enough of an edge to have a chance at overcoming this thing.

  He grabbed a towel from the coffee cart, using it to mop his damp face while he poured a cup of coffee.

  In the meantime, what if it were true that there were outside interests who had a stake in keeping this conflict stirred up? If so, all the aid America could pour in might not be enough to make a difference.

  If only they knew just what the guerrillas were up to out there under cover of the DMZ. Well, it was his job to find out. But this had to be the worst possible time to drop a whole new batch of bargaining chips into the guerrillas’ hands. It was craziness, no matter what the State Department or his own superiors back in Miami had to say.

  The colonel’s thoughts returned to the gang of reporters that had intruded into his world today and would soon be back again. Along with being a persistent security threat, the media were a real pain—always wanting to talk to and “understand” the bad guys. Aiding and abetting, that’s what he called it. Only last week he’d read a sympathetic AP article based on interviews with a group of female guerrillas, as though their Marxist revolution was just some new version of women’s lib. If they ever gave the forces of law and order the kind of good press they gave the bad guys …

  Still, there were government employees on that plane as well. And even among the media pukes, there probably existed a few real human beings. The image of an eager young face swam reluctantly to the surface of the colonel’s mind—suddenly he swore long and loud. Throwing the towel aside, he slammed his coffee cup down on his desk and strode over to the sat-phone. The satellite dish caught the signal, but this time it didn’t bounce it northward to Florida. Nor was its reception at the other end an audible one.

  “I know you’re out there,” he said curtly. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve got trouble coming your way. Get in touch with me as soon as you can.”

  * * *

  He already knew trouble was coming. He could see it out the porthole of the DC4. He watched as the ambulance transporting casualties shrank to the size of a Matchbox toy. There might be men he knew among them, and in the downed combat helicopter as well. It hadn’t been easy to project the indifference he was far from feeling, but then a talent for dissimulation had been a part of his qualifications for this assignment.

  Call it what it is. Lying!

  Had he been recognized? Not that it mattered now. Those few who knew his identity would keep their mouths shut, and this new mission had already compromised the usefulness of his cover. Worse, it was jeopardizing hard, patient months of labor. And he was so close! He could feel it. When he was out there, he could taste it on the jungle breeze—an unease that diffused through the villages, the jungle camps, the very branches of the trees, so that even the wildlife seemed spooked.

  The next step was to track it back.

  If there was time.

  And time was something this latest development had snatched from his grasp.

  * * *

  Julie tightened her seatbelt as the DC4 left the military base behind and banked left over the coca fields. She had both seats to herself, her former seatmate having shifted across the aisle, hands gesturing rapidly as she murmured to a sleek, bent head. Who had Sondra booted out to squeeze in with the CNN correspondent? Talking Tom Chaney out of his makeup artist, I’ll lay a bet!

  Well, more power to her! Julie wasn’t going to complain about the extra leg space. Her eyes strayed again to the back of a green-and-brown cap two rows ahead, worn by a man who had saved her life.

  What a strange incident!

  What a strange man!

  She dismissed him from her thoughts because the DC4 was once again leaving the cleared cropland and villages and winging out over the unbroken expanse of rainforest. Like a magnet too powerful to resist, Julie’s eyes were drawn to that tossing green sea. A jungle is a jungle is a jungle. So why did every square meter seem suddenly familiar, every towering hardwood thrusting its crown above the other trees seem to be one that Julie knew, the curves of each muddy stream seem recognizable?

  The tension that had been there since Julie’s first glimpse of Colombia was building again in her stomach. In another half-hour—no, less now—she would no longer be able to dodge her past. But not yet! Forcing her eyes from the window, she snatched up an unread printout from the embassy folder.

  The file was Dr. Winifred Renken
’s history of the I’paa tribe. Julie had recognized the name while doing her earlier research. A small clan of the tribe lived downstream from San Ignacio, and in fact the Ipa River flowing past the town had been named after them. Their village was an easy Cessna flight from San Ignacio, and Julie had often visited there with her parents as a child. An organized history of the tribe should prove interesting. Burying her nose in the report, Julie began to read.

  As a distraction, it proved more than adequate. Julie hadn’t finished the first page before a rising indignation drove away all thoughts of her approaching destination. This wasn’t history; it was sheer fictional propaganda! If you believed what Dr. Renken had to say, the I’paa—in fact, all the jungle Indians—were a bunch of saints, living for thousands of years in perfect harmony with both a benevolent Mother Earth and their neighboring tribal groups, never stooping like other peoples to the use of weapons or war.

  Yeah, right!

  Julie knew and appreciated the I’paa more than this anthropologist ever could. But if the I’paa had been so peace loving, they’d have been wiped out long ago by their more aggressive neighbors. That was just the way human history went. Tribal culture with its warring nomadic lifestyle had varied little over the centuries from the North American Indians clear back through Europe’s own Celts and Britons and Gauls all the way to the dawn of recorded history. You either fought or were absorbed by your enemies until one group grew large and powerful enough to move to the next inevitable social experiment—a peace imposed at the end of a sword that allowed for the beginnings of settled towns and organized agriculture.