The DMZ Page 3

  So the young sentry returned to his uneasy study of the night. He stiffened briefly as his flared nostrils caught the sharp tang of smoke. Then he saw the red glow tracing lazy patterns across the way. He frowned. Smoking on duty was an infraction winked at all the way up to the base commander himself. But at night, when every sense needed to be on alert for intruders, it was a foolish distraction.

  “Hola, Raul,” he hissed. “What do you think you’re doing, idiota? Put that thing out!”

  His only answer was a low laugh.

  “Hey, Julio, hombre, why so serious?” Raul called back, softly raising the cigarette for another lazy drag. “There’s nothing out there! Even the frogs think it’s too wet to fiesta and have gone to bed. Which is where I belong. You want me to stay awake over here, you leave me my cigarillos”

  “Oh, sí? Well, don’t blame me if some guerrilla uses you for target practice. That cigarillo lights you up like a Christmas tree from a kilometer away.”

  The retort was more bantering than serious. The night’s damp tranquility was having its effect on Julio. Tilting his hat to relieve a trickle of water down his neck, he shifted his M-16 to a more comfortable position and returned his scrutiny to the strip of no-man’s-land that separated the perimeter wall from the jungle. After all, even if the guerrillas came, how far would they get?

  The young sentry risked another glance over his shoulder to where a small galvanized-metal hangar glinted silver under the floodlights at the far end of the parade ground, and he remembered the impressive aircraft inside. He had been watching yesterday when it hovered to a landing. Its Colombian pilot had explained to the comandante that the UH-60A Black Hawk combat helicopter was the americanos’ latest contribution to their two countries’ joint efforts against the narcotráfico—to be used for combating drug traffickers, not the guerrillas, the americano advisor who had accompanied the machine had added sternly. As if there were any distinction!

  Julio could still see in his mind’s eye the deadly beauty of the aircraft, long and sleek and bristling with armament. What would it be like to sit behind one of those powerful machine guns he’d seen mounted in the open doors? Or even in the pilot’s own seat?

  “Hey, Raul,” he called softly. “You ever thought of putting in for pilot’s training?”

  There was no answer. An annoyed glance showed his partner standing in the same half-slump he’d maintained the whole watch. Was he asleep? No, there was the lazy spiral of his cigarette still rising and falling against the night.

  The young soldier stiffened. No, wait, there was the red glow of Raul’s cigarette fallen to rest at his side. Then what was that second red dot centering in on …

  “Raul!”

  The sound was no more than a small pfff, and Raul’s sudden slump might have been a stumble. But Julio knew with sudden horror that it wasn’t. He knew also in that instant why the night had seemed so silent. That wasn’t the tranquility of slumbering creatures out there. It was the wary stillness due to some intruder violating their territory.

  He hit the ground, and a second pfff slammed into the gravel beside his head. Rolling over, he got his M-16 off his shoulder and up. A red dot played toward him across the gravel, but Julio ignored it as he raised the automatic rifle to his shoulder. He’d never seen anything like that probing deadly light, but he’d read of such things—a sniper rifle with infrared laser scope and silencer. One more evidence that the guerrillas were vastly better equipped than his country’s own forces of law and order. To have cleared the perimeter wall, the angle of fire had to have come from high up in the branches of those mango trees across the no-man’s-land. Pressing down on the trigger, Julio let off a burst of fire. The bobbing red light evaporated into a scream of pain.

  Raking the mangos with a final spray of bullets, Julio rose to a crouch and sprinted, not toward his friend—whose still form no longer needed him—but where duty and orders demanded. A single wild grapefruit tree had been left uncleared beside the guard box. Grabbing a rope hanging from its branches, he began to pull. A dinner bell was hardly a standard alarm system for a military base, but it had the advantage of being cheap, unaffected by the area’s frequent power outages, and audible for a kilometer around. Glancing up to his right, Julio could see a slumped figure hanging limp over the rail of the nearest guard tower. The raider’s plan of attack was obvious and brilliant. If they had been able to pick off all the sentries, they could have been inside the base’s line of defense before the alarm was ever sounded.

  But this time at least they had failed. Already, running feet and urgent shouts were erupting from the barracks. There was only one meaning for that clanging bell at this hour of night, and every soldier there kept his weapons ready for just such an eventuality. On the far side of the base, the distinctive rat-tat-tat of a guard tower’s mounted machine gun said that one of their dead comrades had been replaced. A squad reached the front perimeter as Julio sprinted back to his post, fanning out into empty firing slots along the wall. Slamming another banana clip into place, Julio joined his fire to theirs. A line of dark shadows running low across the no-man’s-land melted back into the cover of the jungle.

  It wasn’t over so quickly. Even as Julio relaxed his grip on his weapon, a streak of lightning screamed out of the jungle and slammed into the gate. The heavy metal buckled under the explosion but clung to its reinforced hinges. A second explosion whistled overhead to smash into a tool shed, sending shrapnel ripping through a unit of running soldiers. Rocket launchers were becoming distressingly portable and easy to come by in the present international arms market.

  But the comandante was now getting his counterattack organized. Bursts of automatic rifle fire announced the driving back of intruders along the other three perimeter walls. An artillery shell whistling down into the mango trees put an end to the missile launches.

  Then the throp-throp of helicopter blades added itself to the clatter of gunfire. Cheers rose from the soldiers as the Black Hawk lifted off to swoop in over the no-man’s-land, the M-60 machine guns mounted in its open doors hammering at the edge of the jungle.

  The raiding party faded into the jungle under the attack, but still they would not admit defeat, darting forward to let off a burst of fire at the Black Hawk or to lob a grenade over the perimeter wall before ducking back into the trees where the chopper’s firepower couldn’t reach them. One sniper even managed to put a lucky shot through one of the gunners. The enraged Black Hawk crew answered with an air-to-surface missile that stopped the ground fire from that sector at least. But the shooting continued elsewhere.

  The raiders’ prolonged fighting surprised Julio. The guerrillas had to know that they had lost this round, and they were not partisans of hopeless causes—unless one counted their continued attempt to overthrow his country’s government, and that no longer seemed as hopeless as it once had. So why didn’t they quit? Retreat deep into the jungle was their usual habit when confronted with uncomfortable odds. They had, after all, inflicted satisfactory damage for one night.

  Julio was slamming his last banana clip into his M-16 when he noticed the shadow. It drifted against the background of the jungle like a black cloud, but not like any cloud he’d ever seen before.

  As quickly as the image had registered, it was blown away in an explosion of sound and fire. Stunned, Julio turned his gaze upward. Every eye on the base did the same, every mouth opened with identical expressions of shock and horror as the broken, flaming pieces of the Black Hawk began to rain down. A second explosion slammed through the base’s fuel storage tank. The resulting fireball rose high above the treetops and raced outward faster than the wind in a furnace of superheated gases. Expressions of dismay dissolved into screams of agony.

  * * *

  From the safe cover of a huge mahogany tree, the rebel strike leader watched the carnage until the flames started to die down. Then he lifted a handheld radio to his mouth. He spoke one phrase, then melted silently into the jungle. His work was finished for
the night.

  * * *

  It was well past daylight before an army convoy showed up, wondering why the caretakers of the sector’s newest multi-million-dollar asset had dropped from radio contact. One of the recruits there might have told them of that eerie, looming shadow, but there were no survivors.

  * * *

  The old chief could make no sense of what the riowa were saying.

  There were two of them. Three, including the one who claimed to be of his people and yet was no less a foreigner than the others, and who wore clothing the chief had seen only in riowa pictures of their great ones—including a shirt as white as the chief’s had been before many washings in the river. Over it was another garment of a heaviness better suited to the high mountain slopes than the heat of the jungle. Sweat steamed from the dark cloth and made river paths down the visitor’s fat cheeks, and he tugged endlessly at a thin length of cloth knotted around his neck.

  The man’s discomfort seemed as senseless as much of what he’d had to say, but perhaps such clothing was meant to make him feel like one of the riowa great ones. He certainly strutted in his useless, shiny footwear, as though he himself were the village chief.

  The other two riowa, a man and a woman, were not so foolish. The man wore a thin cotton shirt like the chief’s own, and his pants did not reach his pale knees. Not even in his years in the outside world had the chief seen a riowa like this one—a forearm’s length taller than any man in the village and thin as famine with eyes the shade of a stagnant pool and hair that curled up like dead leaves in the sun’s heat. Clearly his kind was not intended for this climate; already the sun had touched his flesh with the same fire that burned in his hair.

  The woman was dressed like him, in pants as a man. She too was taller than any woman should be, and her hair—a yellow as pale as the sun’s rays—was chopped short at the neck. She spoke with the authority of a man, so that only the softness of her form under the man’s clothing told that she was indeed a female. The woman reminded the chief of his second wife, who had died two decades ago and had taken many beatings to bring into submission. This one undoubtedly would too. It was she who now spoke sharply to the man who claimed to be of his people in a Spanish even poorer than the chief’s own.

  “Look, Roberto, are you sure he understands what we’re asking here? Surely you’ve explained just what the oil companies will mean to him and his people. This is the closest village to the drilling site. We have to have their support if we’re going to claim this region as part of the reserve.”

  Her interpreter wiped a damp handkerchief across his face. “I have done my best. These people are slow of understanding—the old man above all. But I will try again.”

  Roberto Quiroga made little effort to hide his disdain as he glanced around the circle of village men, some naked except for a leather G-string, others in the tattered shorts or pants that exposure to the outside world had taught them to wear. His mother had come from just such a village, a scattering of bamboo huts along a jungle river—a fact he had long consigned to oblivion until his native blood suddenly became politically expedient. The tongue she had taught him in childhood had procured his present coveted position with the Bureau for Indigenous Peoples, but this was his first actual venture into the jungle settlements of his mother’s people.

  The uneasy murmur of the villagers revealed blackened toothless gums, and the eyes of one small girl peering from the dark interior of a bamboo hut were swollen and encrusted with the early stages of glaucoma. Beside the hut, flies rose from a pile of entrails and discarded skins to settle on his sleeve. Thousands more swarmed over the bloody carcasses of two wild pigs hanging in a nearby tree.

  And this was the life these gringos were so anxious to preserve! But then the americanos were all loco.

  Still, they paid well …

  Drawing himself up under the suit coat that was the badge of his civilized status, Quiroga looked sternly down at the village chief seated royally before him on a mahogany stump. “Listen to me, old man. These people with me have come all the way from norteamerica to help us. They have powerful friends and much money, and they wish to use it to fight el gobierno”—he used the Spanish phrase as there was no equivalent in the tongue of his childhood—“on our behalf. It is the instruction of the other leaders of our tribe that your people give them whatever they should wish of you.”

  The chief gave this veiled order no more consideration than it deserved. The remaining settlements of his small Amazonic tribe lay a considerable distance away; in this village at least his own word was law. With a sharp hand gesture, he cut into the lecture. “Why are they here?”

  Quiroga broke off, annoyed. “How can you ask why they are here? Have I not explained again and again? They wish to help us stand against the foreigners who would harm our lands.”

  “No, no!” The chief waved his words away impatiently. “What I ask is why do they wish to help us? One does not give without demanding something in return. We are but a poor people in a poor country and have nothing to offer them. Why should these riowa wish to travel all this way from their own country to give us this help of which you speak? What are they seeking from us?”

  “They are spies for the guerrillas,” one of the village men muttered from behind the chief’s shoulder. Glaring at the visitors, he shifted his spear threateningly. “Is it not the guerrillas who wish the foreigners to leave these lands? And we have seen the written paper the FARC has given these riowa to cross our territory.”

  A rumble of assent rose from the other men.

  “Hey, just a minute, what are they saying?” the woman demanded. She sighed audibly as Quiroga translated the chief’s comments. “The guerrillas have been decent enough to give us safe passage, but we are not in league with them. Honestly, I thought you explained all that to them, Roberto! Okay, let’s start over, and this time you give it to him exactly as I give it to you, understand?”

  Anger flamed in Quiroga’s eyes at her curt tone, and only a reminder of that bonus paycheck kept his annoyance from his face as he began translating her stumbling Spanish. Perhaps some of the old ways had merit after all—at least a woman knew her place.

  “Look, the guerrillas may have their own reasons for wanting to keep the oil companies out of here, but I promise we have nothing to do with them. As we’ve already explained, the Coalition for the Preservation of Amazonic Peoples is totally nonprofit. We have no wish to take anything from you or to benefit from you in any way. The reason we’re here is that we admire and respect the life you’ve built for yourselves, and we want to help you preserve it.”

  The woman stooped a little to bring her earnest gaze level with the old chief’s. “Do you know just how much you have to teach the rest of the world? You people were practicing true ecology while the white man was cutting down forests, stripping the earth of its metals and fuels, and exhausting the soil with his crops. Just look at how you live—in such perfect harmony with the needs of the forest around you. You plant your crops under the shelter of the great trees instead of cutting them down. You move your villages and fields every few years so the land can renew itself. And the way you’ve held back your population growth so the animals can flourish in their own biological niche in the food chain—it’s incredible!”

  A tinge of contempt edged Quiroga’s translation as the woman’s voice rose with the enthusiasm of a fanatic. “And you wonder why we want to help you! You and your people are an example to our polluted, overpopulated world of how we should care for and protect our Mother Earth, not exploit and destroy her. That’s why we’ve come to stand with you against those who would destroy your way of life and push their own ideas and culture on you.”

  Running out of steam, the woman reached for a briefcase sitting at her feet. She looked around for a surface on which to set it before dumping the case into Quiroga’s arms and snapping open the latches.

  “Here!” She lifted out a laptop computer and balanced it on the briefcase. “Maybe,”
she told Quiroga, “if we show them the map and explain just what it is we’re wanting to do …”

  A collective gasp rose from the villagers as the computer screen blazed to life. A mosaic of browns and greens replaced the Microsoft logo. Turning the laptop so that the screen faced the chief, she nodded to Quiroga.

  “Tell him this is a picture of his land from far above in the sky.”

  Throwing her a dark glance, Quiroga deliberately bent to place the awkward weight in his arms on the ground before turning to the chief. But before he could translate, the chief announced with quiet dignity, “I know what a map is.”

  The woman broke off, nonplused. “Oh, so you speak Spanish,” she said with mingled annoyance and relief. “Well, why didn’t you—?”

  “I know the words you say,” the chief went on quietly. “But I do not understand what they mean. This word ‘ecology’—we do not know of what you speak. We take from the land what we need to survive. If we have planted in the shade of the great trees, it is because we have not had a machete big enough to cut them down. If we must move often to new lands, it is because the soil in which we grow our crops becomes too poor to produce the food we need. If our people have not spread out across the land, it is because the sicknesses of the wet season and the attacks of our enemies have kept our people few. We have never set ourselves to care for the earth as our Mother. We have simply sought to survive.”

  The woman was speechless. Then she gathered herself together. “Well, maybe you haven’t understood all the implications of what you’re doing. But I can assure you, your way of life is exactly what this planet needs. And that’s why we’re going to do all we can to make sure you keep it.”

  She broke off to look around for her other companion. The man had stepped away and was prowling around the village, ducking his lanky frame to peer into the low doorways of the bamboo huts. She raised her voice. “Hey, John, let’s get some pictures taken here. We’re going to need them for PR. Maybe start with those kids over there.”