The DMZ Page 22

  The respectful silence that followed extended well beyond the refreshment table. Julie, glancing around at the battery of eyes on her, dropped hastily into a nearby chair.

  “A very possible interpretation,” Tom Chaney admitted smoothly. His gaze touched Julie briefly as though trying to figure out who she was. Then he returned to his audience. “Which makes you wonder who’s running their PR program. Pretty professional for a bunch of backwoods revolutionaries.”

  “I thought it was interesting how much of the guerrillas’ rhetoric was directed against America,” Andy Rodriguez put in. “Granted, the counter-narcotics fight has put a crimp in their operations. But you’d think from the way he talks that the United States was their enemy rather than the Colombian government.…”

  “Well! You really did do your homework!”

  The bored drawl was Sondra Kharrazi’s. Julie turned her head to see the NBC correspondent pull up a chair, placing it—coincidentally or not—where it received the most benefit from the nearest fan. She had the laptop Julie had seen on the plane. Opening it on her lap, she began running a modem from it to the smallest sat-phone Julie had ever seen. Behind her, William lowered the equipment bag to the floor.

  “So,” she asked Julie, “you never did tell me. How did you get to be such an expert?”

  Uncomfortable at the attention, Julie chose to take the question as rhetorical. “You’ve done your homework too. I didn’t realize you spoke Spanish until I saw you out there.”

  The other woman’s penciled brows lifted. “I speak a lot of languages. That’s why I have this job.”

  Julie accepted the rebuke meekly. Maybe the woman did deserve that cameraman. And the research crews.

  “Mind if I join you two?” Tim McAdams hauled up another chair beside the two women, its metal frame creaking as he settled into it. For all his fair coloring, the missionary journalist showed little effects of the last hour in the sun, and neither his affable grin nor the twinkle in his blue eyes had diminished.

  Opening a briefcase on his lap, he told Julie earnestly, “I heard what you had to say. I’m impressed! You really do know your stuff—more than anyone else I’ve talked to around here. I’d kind of like to pick your brains myself. Got a few minutes?”

  He looked at Julie hopefully as he extracted a micro-recorder from the briefcase. His good humor was irresistible, and Julie found her lips twitching in response. “Sure, pick away! Just leave me a few for myself. I don’t have a lot to spare.”

  Her eyes widened with appreciation as he opened the briefcase further to add a micro-cassette to the recorder. Julie was far from up-to-date on high-tech equipment, Norm Hutchens having barely moved himself—and his magazine—into the computer age. But Tim’s laptop and sat-phone equipment were at least the equal of Sondra Kharrazi’s or even Tom Chaney’s. “Nice tools! Now that’s what I call impressive.”

  The lid of the briefcase snapped shut. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Tim agreed, his blue eyes limpid as they smiled down into hers. “A donation from a Christian organization interested in improving the quality of religious news.”

  A Christian organization with some funds. Julie’s own parents had never moved beyond an outdated VHS camcorder that someone had donated to film footage of their medical ministry. Oh really? Which one? was on her lips before Julie remembered his earlier reaction and bit it back. Just because she had been raised in missionary circles and knew a lot of these groups gave her no right to be nosy.

  “Look, I’m really no big expert on Colombian affairs,” she said instead. “But I do know the area a bit. What is it you would like to know?”

  “Señorita?”

  Julie glanced up, startled at the interruption. A young guerrilla girl was peering down over the top of the enclosure. The black ponytail hanging down under the army cap was the same as every other female guerrilla Julie had seen, but the Che Guevara insignia on the upper sleeve identified her as the same girl whose picture Andy Rodriguez had snapped earlier. The tip of her assault rifle was thrust up over the plywood with a carelessness that made Julie hope the safety was on.

  The girl looked from one woman to the other. “Are you the señorita Sondra Kharrazi? They are in need of your presence.”

  Julie saw the self-complacency visibly drain from Sondra’s beautiful features. “Great!” she muttered. “I’d forgotten about the ID.”

  Stuffing the sat-phone into her purse, she shoved the laptop and other equipment at William. She glanced down at Julie as she rose gracefully to her stiletto heels, and Julie was surprised to see appeal there.

  “Julie—?”

  Julie knew what the NBC correspondent was too proud to ask outright. Julie was, after all, the only other woman here and not entirely a stranger. She jumped to her feet.

  “Would you like me to go with you? Hey, no problem! I’d be glad to!”

  * * *

  Despite the tense occasion, Julie felt a sense of release as the young guerrilla girl led them out of the enclosure. They were led around the DC3 to a door set into the side wall. This opened into a hall with smooth cement floors and whitewashed walls, which Julie surmised was the control tower.

  Her guess was confirmed when their guide led them through a second door into a large tiled room. A scattering of wicker couches offered seating for passengers, and at the far end a plate-glass window looked out over the airstrip. Beside it was a boarding gate.

  Two armed guards prowled the lounge, and another stood at attention in front of a door across the room. There was no sign of the forensic team, but Julie immediately spotted Bill Shidler and his State Department associates standing in a stiff group over by the plate-glass window. Her mind raced as she followed the guerrilla girl across the tiled floor.

  Talk about a press scoop! An exclusive look inside the guerrilla stronghold. And the autopsy too! This would put the final laurels on her article, if nothing else did. Maybe even open the doors for some extra pieces. AP and Reuters, for sure. Now if she could discreetly manage a few snapshots on that digital camera …

  Julie caught the rigidity of Sondra’s expression and with shame remembered she was here to offer support to a friend—well, acquaintance, at least—not to further her own career.

  Still, even as she offered Sondra a reassuring pat on the arm, her mind was cataloging every detail. It was cool in here, despite the sun streaming in through that plate-glass window, almost chilly after the sweltering furnace of the hangar.

  And the smell.

  It caught at her throat, dampening Julie’s enthusiasm. Not that it was, objectively, so unpleasant—a cloying sweetness oddly reminiscent of a hospital with its masking deodorizers and a high-school biology experiment she preferred to forget. And something more. Sondra stumbled on her high heels, clutching at Julie’s arm, and Julie felt her own steps falter as she recognized it for what it was.

  The smell of death.

  Both the smell and the chill grew stronger as their guide led the two women across the lounge to the door with the armed guard outside. Julie’s steps faltered further as she recognized the guerrilla on duty there. The young man who had been on the platform. Carlos.

  But there was no recognition in the black eyes as the guard reached behind him to knock on the closed door. Either Julie was mistaken, or the passing years had blurred any resemblance of her adult person to a small boy’s memories.

  “Hey! Excuse me.” Bill Shidler hurried across the lounge. “Excuse me, but if these women are to identify the victims, then I must insist that you allow me to accompany them. These people are American citizens, and my embassy must have visual confirmation that there has been a positive identification.”

  His response was an assault rifle blocking his passage.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Carlos returned stiffly. “I have not been given such orders.”

  “I am not interested in the orders you were given. A personal identification by a member of the U.S. State Department was one of the conditions agreed upon by you
r own superiors when this mission was arranged.”

  His protest broke off as the door swung open. The interpreter, Julie’s rescuer, stepped out into the lounge. He took in the altercation with an indifferent glance, then gave the sentry a curt nod. “Let them in.”

  Bill Shidler was first into the room. Sondra’s nails dug painfully into Julie’s arm as the two women followed. The cold hit like an icy blast as soon as they were inside, refreshing at first to Julie’s heated cheeks, then biting into her exposed skin. One shivering glance explained the temperature and the guerrillas’ assurances to the forensic team. Lacking a proper morgue to preserve the bodies for autopsy, they had with the ingenuity born of small resources constructed their own.

  It was a baggage storage room, with wide shelves and a pair of luggage carts pushed up against one wall. The guerrillas had brought in one of the huge walk-in refrigeration units used to hang beef quarters in the meat markets that had access to electricity—another sign of progress for San Ignacio. When Julie’s was a child, livestock were butchered fresh each dawn and sold before the sun was high enough to spoil the meat.

  The bodies were laid out on three wooden tables, set directly in front of the open doors of the refrigerator unit so the stream of cold air played over them. Around the tables, the forensic team bustled in their white coats while an assortment of guerrillas in their battle fatigues stood back out of their way watching. They were the same group, Julie recognized, who had accompanied the FARC commander on the platform.

  Comandante Aguilera himself stood at one end of the tables, forcing the medical examiners to walk around him as he scrutinized every move the forensic team made. Neither the UN team nor the guerrillas seemed bothered in the least by the cold or the bodies in front of them.

  Or the smell, which was unbearably strong now that the door was shut, its sickly sweetness separating itself to Julie’s senses into some powerful commercial disinfectant, formaldehyde, a jumble of other chemicals, and carrion scent underlying it all, a smell that reminded Julie horribly of those same meat stalls in the market when the sun was high and all that remained were the pools of spilled blood and fly-infested scraps.

  The interpreter led Bill Shidler and the two women across the room. “Well, one thing is for sure,” the woman examiner—Dr. Kristin Gustofferson from Sweden, if Julie remembered correctly—was saying to her colleagues, “this was no crime of violence. No knife wounds. No gunshots. No blood. We’re going to have to move to pathological analysis. Tissue samples. Cultures. Drug tests. And that’s going to mean taking specimens back to New York.”

  “Maybe they drowned.” The East Indian head of the forensic team, Dr. Ravi Gupta, was carefully setting out what looked suspiciously like the tools of a butcher shop. Long carving knives. Smaller short ones. Even a saw with serrated edges. “Maybe their canoe overturned. Their Indian guides panicked when they drowned and just dragged the bodies ashore and dumped them.”

  “With that three-week gap? Impossible. Don’t forget, Dr. Renken’s effects turned up at that village long before the time of death. Though it’s possible we’re looking at some tropical fever.” The Swedish medical examiner straightened and looked impatiently around. “Blast it, where’s that tree-hugger! We can’t get started until the ID is done.” Her choleric eye fell on Julie and Sondra. “Oh, there you are! Well, let’s get on with it. We don’t have all day!”

  That not everyone might share her own cavalier approach to death didn’t seem to occur to the medical examiner. Julie yielded reluctantly as Sondra’s tight grip on her arm practically dragged her toward the tables. She had never seen a dead body except as a child at the occasional village funeral, which in this climate was held within hours of death.

  This was vastly different. Despite the present refrigeration, time and the elements had not treated the three victims well. Their clothing was fairly intact, though ripped and stained with a dried muck that must have been rinsed off the bodies themselves. The rest was intact as well, but the exposed limbs were faintly bloated so that they strained at the cloth that covered them like human-shaped balloons that had been blown up too full. Julie could see muscle-deep tears in the pale flesh of the nearest body—a woman’s—that were made more grotesque by having been rinsed clean of blood and mud.

  As for the faces …

  Julie’s stomach heaved. How could anyone make a positive ID through that ruin? Then she caught a gagging sound beside her, and a glance at Sondra’s pale face reminded her that this was a whole lot worse for the NBC correspondent than for her. After all, these were people Sondra had known and worked with, however briefly. Gently loosening her arm from Sondra’s clutching fingers, Julie put it instead around Sondra’s shoulders. Her hands under Julie’s were cold and clammy as she spun away from the tables.

  “It’s them. Those are the clothes they were wearing when they left. And their watches. The size … the hair … John Goodson had red hair like that. And that scar on the left arm … Dr. Renken was bit by a monkey the first day I was there. The native—I don’t know. He wasn’t dressed like that, but those are his shoes. He was so proud of them he had to wear them everywhere.…”

  “That will be adequate,” the Swedish doctor said. “Now if you will please clear the area.” Bill Shidler shrugged his acquiescence, and Comandante Aguilera clapped his hands together sharply. At the sound, the door flew open and the young guard stepped inside to escort Shidler and the two women out. Julie kept her eyes down as she stepped past Carlos. She was fairly certain by now that he hadn’t recognized her. Still, why chance any jogging of his memory?

  Instant relief swept over Julie as the door closed, shutting away that scene of death. Even the air smelled fresh in comparison. The rest of the State Department team was no longer standing at the plate-glass window but were seated on one of the wicker couches around a coffee table and were eating. She was reminded that it was long past lunchtime.

  “Señor? Señoritas? Su almuerzo.” The young guerrilla girl who had guided them from the hangar called out to them. She carried a tray with three enamel bowls filled to overflowing with some thick stew. Their contents were redolent of beef and fat and garlic, at any other time an appetizing combination. But with the stench of death still in her nostrils, Julie felt her stomach heave. Beside her, Sondra clapped her hand to her mouth.

  “Get me out of here!” she said through gritted teeth.

  Julie spotted the familiar sign across the lounge and steered Sondra toward the door at a run. She breathed deeply, forcing her own stomach under control as Sondra dove into the nearest stall. The NBC correspondent emerged some time later, her beautiful features pallid and a decade older.

  “Boy, I don’t know what’s gotten into me!” she admitted shamefacedly. “Nothing’s ever gotten under my skin like that. It’s just … I’ve just never been that close to a dead body … people I know!” A deep shudder went through her. “That could have been me there.… It could have been me!”

  “Hey, it’s okay!” Julie had seldom felt so inadequate as she again put her arms around Sondra. Her parents would have surely known what to say. Or even Tim McAdams, who had demonstrated his glibness in her own distress.

  God is in control; He will bring good out of this.

  They died for a good cause.

  Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

  The Bible verse was one of many she’d been assigned to memorize at that missionary boarding school. Why had it come so clearly to mind now?

  Real comforting! How about, they were stupid enough to go wandering around the jungle where they didn’t belong and got what was to be expected. You stick your neck on the line, you get it chopped off.

  But Sondra was already pulling away. Drawing her slim figure to its full elegant height, she sauntered over to the sink and began repairing her ravaged makeup.

  “Interesting that they haven’t found any cause of death,” she commente
d as she outlined her lips in bright red. “I wonder if I could get that out on the sat-link before CNN has a chance. Maybe live on the six o’clock news. I need a scoop on Tom Chaney.”

  Sondra was fast returning to normal, Julie saw wryly. She glanced around as they emerged from the bathroom. But the guerrilla girl wasn’t there, and the meal she had served had been cleared away. The coolness of the air felt wonderfully refreshing compared to the steam bath that would be awaiting them back in the hangar, and after that autopsy room, even the hospital odor wasn’t so bad.

  “So what do we do now?” Julie wondered aloud. “Ask one of those guards to check us back into jail?”

  Sondra snorted. “Are you kidding? We’ve got air-conditioning here, decent seats, quiet!” Dropping her handbag onto the nearest couch, she pulled out her sat-phone and began punching in numbers. “They’re going to have to drag me kicking and screaming to get me back out there.”

  Sinking down onto the end of the couch, Julie tucked her feet beneath her. Draining the rest of her water bottle, she dug into her knapsack for some granola bars she’d picked up in the Washington airport. They were a much more appetizing proposition right now than stew. Julie offered a bar to Sondra, who took it without dropping a beat of her animated phone conversation.

  Bill Shidler and his State Department team hardly acknowledged the two women’s presence in the lounge. They were huddled in a meeting of their own, their heads close together in earnest discussion. Julie was struck by the air of quiet competence that characterized the two men with Bill Shidler, their heads coming up constantly to scan the lounge with much the same wary vigilance she’d seen on the faces of the guerrilla sentries. State Department—or military intelligence? She’d bet her press tag those two weren’t civilians.