The DMZ Read online

  “Hey, you’re kind of blocking things!”

  So she was! Julie threw an apologetic smile over her shoulder and clattered down the rest of the steps—only to find her view abruptly cut off by the press of reporters who had descended before her. As the plane continued to empty behind her, Julie gave up trying to thread through the pack. She wasn’t going to see a thing while trying to crane over the shoulders of this predominantly male crowd.

  Dodging a camera tripod that a German crew was setting up, she ducked instead under the wing of the plane and made her way forward to the nose, slipping under it to the other side. The news crews hadn’t made it this far, and Julie, leaning against the base of the nearest landing wheel, had a clear view of the runway and the river beyond.

  No, this was San Ignacio, however changed. There were the docks where her father had preferred to tether his Cessna with its pontoons attached for easier flying up and down the river. Beside the docks was the blackened shell of the building that had served as both customs office and police station. It had been San Ignacio’s sole law enforcement, its only task enforcing the excise taxes collected from passing cargo boats. Its destruction was surely the handiwork of the guerrillas.

  “Alto!”

  An armed man silhouetted against the bright sunlight suddenly materialized to block her path. Instinctively raising her hands, Julie took a step back under the nose of the DC4.

  “Alto!” The man followed her, and as he stepped from the sunshine into the shade, Julie blinked with astonishment, her hands dropping forgotten to her side. This soldier in the mottled greens and browns of combat fatigues, holding her at gunpoint with a deadly looking assault rifle, was no man. He was a boy!

  Barely taller than Julie herself, he had the gangly awkwardness of a teenager who hadn’t yet reached full height, and his brave attempt at trimming the few straggling dark hairs on his upper lip only made him look younger. His battle uniform was too big, hanging loosely from the shoulders and cinched in tight around the waist. But there was nothing childish in the practiced ease with which he swung his weapon around to follow Julie’s hasty retreat, nor in the implacable black chips of ice that were his eyes.

  “Vaya! Go! You are not allowed here.”

  The gesture of the barrel was as unmistakable as the words. Julie backed quickly away, and as she did so, she saw what the press of disembarking passengers had hidden. Other guards fanned out to form a loose circle around the plane, each cradling an assault rifle across his chest, eyes alert and wary under the shade of a camouflage cap.

  Julie blinked again with fresh shock and outrage. That these were the guerrillas they had come to interview was clear. But they were all so young. None, surely, out of their teens, and several barely into them.

  Nor were they all male. The soldier’s clothing did little to disguise a scattering of softer figures and an occasional ponytail hanging down from under the green-and-brown caps. The shadowed eyes of male and female alike displayed cool vigilance, and the casual handling of their weapons left no doubt that they could—and would—be instantly deployed.

  A chill gripped Julie’s stomach. What—or who—had done this to children, that they should look so hard and cold and … and old?

  “I want a shot of the river.” The authoritative voice belonged to Tom Chaney. “And that burned-out building there too.” Julie scooted backward as his camera crew followed him under the nose of the plane.

  “Alto! You cannot come here!”

  “Now, wait a minute! We just want a few background shots. You tell him, Ron.”

  Seeing the young guerrilla sentry start forward, Julie melted back into the welcome anonymity of the other news crews. They had scattered out, allowing for easier passage. Technicians were setting up sound equipment and testing mikes and satellite feeds.

  Their focus was on a makeshift stage that had been set up beside the air-control tower. Made up of nothing more than planks thrown across a collection of fuel drums, the stage had a clean tarp tossed across it to dress it up. Julie threaded her way toward it.

  She paused beside Andy Rodriguez, who had put away his digital camera and was fiddling with the telephoto lens of a much larger Minolta 35 mm. “Are we still on for pictures?” she asked.

  “You pay usual rates and give me credit, and you’ve got them!”

  Julie nodded, pleased. That worry off her hands, she’d be free to concentrate on her story. Turning away, she caught a wave and beaming smile from Tim McAdams, who was setting up not only the biggest camcorder Julie had seen yet but two still cameras as well. He looked to be thoroughly enjoying himself, and as Julie lifted a hand to acknowledge his wave, he called, “Piece of cake so far, eh? This is really something!”

  His enthusiasm was catching, and Julie found her own step lightening as she made her way closer to the makeshift platform. Beside it, the white-coated UN forensic unit—two men and a woman—were riffling through boxes, lifting out pieces of equipment and sorting through them. Bill Shidler and his State Department team stood around aimlessly, looking less happy. Their guerrilla charges had disappeared.

  Glancing at his watch, Bill Shidler turned to throw an annoyed glance behind him at the platform. Two youths in combat fatigues were there setting up their own sound system—a mike stand and two enormous loudspeakers—while a third youth prowled nearby with his assault rifle in hand. A bright orange extension cord trailed off the stage and into the control tower. The contrast with the news crews’ battery-powered, wireless technology was striking.

  “Julie!”

  Julie didn’t need to turn around to identify those imperious tones. There was only one other female voice on the press team. “Yes, Sondra?”

  The NBC correspondent hurried up, her burly cameraman at her heels, already red and sweaty under the weight of the heavy camcorder on his shoulder. A Japanese newsman hissed angrily as they blocked his lens angle, but Sondra ignored him, waving for William to take up a position in the front row. She grimaced as she shifted on her stiletto heels, and seeing the expression increased Julie’s appreciation for her own sensible walking shoes.

  “Where are the FARC leaders?” Sondra demanded tensely as though Julie might have access to information she didn’t. “All we’ve seen are these—these kids! If they think we’re going to stand around in the sun all day!” Digging into her handbag, she pulled out a lace handkerchief and dabbed at the perspiration that was marring her makeup. “I want to get this over with and get out of here! If this is some kind of scam!”

  Julie was surprised to see Sondra’s hand trembling as she shoved the handkerchief back into her purse. She felt a twinge of compunction and touched Sondra’s arm gently. “Hey, it’s going to be all right!”

  A roar of cheers and whistles from beyond the fence drowned out her reassurance. Julie and Sondra spun around. On the stage, the three guerrilla youth sprang to attention. An excited buzz rippled across the runway. Julie felt her own breath quicken.

  Five men strode across the runway from the control tower. One walked a step ahead—he looked to be in his forties or perhaps older but had the carriage and fitness of a man decades younger. The other four were fanned out behind the frontrunner like some kind of ceremonial guard detail—or perhaps not so ceremonial, by the constant roving of their eyes.

  Of these four, two were the FARC representatives who had been on the DC4. Manuel Flores and the younger guerrilla were no longer unarmed. Their pistol holsters bulged with weapons, and like their companions they had donned some sort of multi-pocketed ammunition vest over their combat fatigues. Assault rifles fit in their hands as though they’d been a missing piece of clothing. The two men surveyed their former fellow passengers with a newly arrogant lift of the head.

  They drew near the stage. The frontrunner stopped before the steps leading up to the platform, and the other four came to a halt a precise pace behind him.

  Bill Shidler hurried forward to greet them. “Guillermo Shidler‚ a su servicio. Embajada de Estados Unido
s.” His Spanish, credibly pronounced, was carried by his clip-on mike across the airstrip. “We wish to express our appreciation for your hospi—”

  Another roar—this time jeers and catcalls—from beyond the chain-link fence drowned him out. A handful of demonstrators on the cab of a truck lifted up an American flag. It had been scorched at the edges and torn, and a swastika splashed in red paint across the Stars and Stripes.

  Ignoring Shidler, the FARC leader lifted a hand, and the commotion immediately died away. Then he snapped his fingers. The young man who had rescued Julie stepped up beside him, slinging his assault rifle over his shoulder. His fluent and only slightly accented English explained why he had been chosen as interpreter. “El comandante Raul Aguilera demands to know where are the United Nations doctors he requested.”

  The three persons in white coats abandoned their equipment and took a step forward. The guerrilla interpreter gave a curt nod. “Which of you is the leader?”

  The three hesitated, murmuring among themselves. Then one stepped forward. He was small and meek-looking with the dark, fine features of southern India.

  “I am Dr. Ravi Gupta, the senior member of this team.” He indicated the other two in white coats. “These are my colleagues, Dr. Kristin Gustofferson of Sweden and Dr. Roger Elliot of Scotland.”

  The interpreter murmured to the FARC leader, whose barely perceptible nod seemed to indicate satisfaction. “It is well. Then may I introduce you to Comandante Raul Aguilera, commander of the Eighth Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.” The interpreter then gave a slight nod toward the older guerrilla who had been with him on the plane. “You are already acquainted with his second-in-command, the honorable Manuel Flores, a brave spokesman whose voice on behalf of our cause has been heard in many parts of the world. In the name of freedom and justice, they bid you welcome to San Ignacio. Is there any among your group who speaks Spanish?”

  Bill Shidler stepped forward, displaying annoyance at being ignored. “Most of the news crews have been chosen with an eye to language proficiency,” he said. “There will be no need to translate speeches. Any dubbing can be done at the newsroom end.”

  The guerrilla interpreter made no response to the political officer’s attempt to regain control of the situation. The doctor from Scotland, Roger Elliot, spoke up. “I speak reasonable Spanish.”

  “Bien! Then you will serve as communicator for your team during the investigation to come.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Bill Shidler interrupted heatedly. “These are American citizens we are talking about here. The agreement was that we would have our own people involved in this investigation. If you need an interpreter, we’ve got them here.” His angry wave indicated the State Department team.

  Commander Aguilera’s murmur to his interpreter made Julie wonder if perhaps he knew more English than he was letting on. The interpreter turned for the first time to speak directly to Shidler, and the arrogance in his tone was a reminder of how their positions had reversed. “You will listen and observe, no more! We will not allow the americanos to obstruct the fair and open execution of this inquiry.”

  Bill Shidler’s mouth dropped open slightly at this twist on his own lecture to the news crews, then shut to form a thin line. Lifting his hands in admission of defeat, he gave a curt nod to his associates, who faded back behind the UN team. As they did so, the woman from the forensic team stepped forward in their place.

  “If you don’t mind, we would really like to get started,” she said quietly, her own English revealing not a hint of her Swedish background. “Every hour counts in these situations, and we’ve already lost a lot of time. As you can see, we’ve brought our own equipment with us, so if you will take us to see the victims, we can begin immediately.”

  Aguilera murmured again to his companion, and the interpreter said stiffly, “You need not be so concerned. We are not savages here. We have taken the necessary steps to preserve the bodies. You will be escorted to them shortly. But first, the comandante will address your company and the world.”

  Raul Aguilera spun sharply on his heel and strode up the steps to the platform. The interpreter slapped his assault rifle back into his hands with military precision, then fell back beside his fellows, and the four of them stepped briskly onto the stage behind their leader. Despite the tenseness of the situation, Julie had to admire the dramatic skill of the guerrillas’ theatrics. These people knew how to put on a show.

  The cheers of the mob outside the fence swelled anew as the FARC commander stood unmoving at the mike. Then he raised both hands in the air, palms outward. Instant silence fell. Like one of those audience prompt cards that read “Applause” and “Silence‚” Julie thought irreverently. All around her, TV cameras shifted their focus from their correspondents to the man on the stage. Reaching into her backpack, Julie pulled out her hand recorder and switched it on.

  “Distinguished guests,” the comandante began, “my fellow Colombians, listening citizens of the world, we welcome you here today. Envoys of that great body of freedom and brotherhood, the United Nations, we bid you to witness for yourselves our innocence of the accusations fabricated against us. Journalists of many nations who have traveled here today, we thank you for this forum to present our struggle for freedom and justice to the world. Representatives of the environmental organizations, we praise you for the commitment you share with us to protect this land from the rapacious greed of capitalists and imperialists.” He pointedly left out any reference to the State Department team.

  There was no attempt to provide a translation into English, but that didn’t seem to faze any of the news crews. Even Sondra Kharrazi was making a low-voiced translation into her lapel mike, an indication that she had a lot more qualifications for this job than Julie would have guessed.

  Aguilera continued. “A crime has brought us all together to this place—to this time. But it is not the crime of three brave men and women who have lost their lives in the struggle for the rights of our indigenous brothers. No, today’s investigation will show that it was no crime but Mother Nature herself who brought about their deaths.

  “The real crime that brings us here today is far greater. It is the crime of a political oligarchy steeped in greed, rapaciousness, and violence. An oligarchy that through an oppressive capitalism concentrates the land and wealth of our nation in the hands of the privileged, leaving hunger, unemployment, and death for the masses who do not take part in their corrupt machinations.”

  The guerrilla leader’s tones were soft, almost conversational, more like a lecturing professor than a leader of armed insurgents. “Yet the crime here is not only that of an oppressive and corrupt government that dares to call itself a democracy while grinding under its foot all free expression of protests against its oppression. Simon Bolívar, the great Liberator of Latin America, himself once declared, ‘The United States appears destined by Providence to plague the Americas with miseries in the name of freedom.’”

  A murmur and an exchange of glances rippled through the press corps. A few feet away, Julie saw Bill Shidler’s mouth press into a thin line.

  “We generations who have followed after have found the Liberator to be a true prophet. Latin America has long suffered under the heavy hand of the various imperialistic policies of the White House and its occupants. In the past they came in the name of freedom and democracy but with the corrupt capitalism of their multinationals to rape our land of its wealth and add it to their own.”

  “Got a point there!” Andy Rodriguez murmured beside Julie.

  “But today,” the comandante continued, “it is not in business suits, but with guns and war planes and soldiers that they come. ‘You have a drug problem,’ the gringos tell us, while they, the principal consumer of narcotics in the world, do little to combat or imprison the great drug mafias that exist within their own country. And in the name of this counter-narcotics conflict that they have forced upon the sovereign states of this region, they place weapons of war
into the hands of the very forces dedicated to oppression and violence.”

  A fresh round of applause followed from beyond the fence, and Aguilera’s passionate voice rose above it.

  “Is the United States of America so naive that it does not know with what it has allied itself? Americans, you who call yourselves friends of freedom, listen to me! It takes no university education to see that the present political order of Colombia is a vicious regime that has imprisoned millions of workers while at the same time criminalizing every form of social protest, so that everyone is indiscriminately labeled as subversive when he protests because of hunger, because of thirst, because of a desire for education, because of wanting to work when no one will give him employment, or because of wanting just wages if he is fortunate enough to have employment.

  “It is not we who fight for the disenfranchised people of this country who are criminal. It is those who label us subversives! And what are their crimes? Their continued refusal to institute any true agrarian reform, to give the land to those who would work it. The absence of health care, housing, education, jobs. And to this we must add the institutionalized violence of the state, exercised through their repressive organs—the military and the police and the paramilitary butchers who are their allies. All to maintain unchanging the established social order for the benefit of the ruling class.”

  Despite the storm of cheers from beyond the fence, Julie caught a low chuckle behind her. She turned her head to meet Andy Rodriguez’s ironic gaze as he lowered the Minolta. “That bit about ‘butchers’—he’s kind of forgetting their own share in all this, isn’t he?”

  Aguilera lifted his hand again for silence.

  “He’s good,” Julie said, “I’ll say that. If I didn’t know better, I’d fall for it myself.”

  “Yeah, well, an even balance of truth and fiction makes the best deception, they say. One thing’s for sure, with a vocabulary like that, he’s no illiterate campesino! Or even just a soldier. If it wasn’t for that military getup, I’d swear he was one of my old sociology profs—leftist speeches and all.” He shifted the camera to snap a shot of the nearest sentry. “Do you think Mr. FARC Commander and those kid followers of his really believe what they’re saying?”