The DMZ Page 34

“Is that not so, Comandante?”

  Victor mumbled something Julie didn’t catch, crossing himself quickly as he did so, before hurrying on toward the latrine. To Julie’s surprise, Enrique paused to hunker down beside Carlos, balancing himself easily on the hard heels of his army boots.

  “Yes, to be sure, I believe in God,” Enrique said quietly, and his hand went to the open neck of his fatigues. Like so many Latin men, he wore a gold chain around his neck, and as his hand closed around it, Julie could see the soft glimmer of a small cross dangling from the end of it.

  Julie looked at the guerrilla leader with exasperation. Enrique had taken time to shave as well as bathe that afternoon—it would seem that he reserved the unkempt look for international press conferences when he had his terrorist reputation to maintain. His longish curls had been ruthlessly combed back, and as the flickering light of the Coleman lamp wavered across the hard, clean planes of his face, Julie realized for the first time, and with something of a shock, that—given other circumstances—Enrique Martinez might be considered a very presentable, if not even handsome, man.

  Which, illogically, made his hypocrisy even worse.

  “How can you say that, Enrique?” she protested impatiently. “I don’t understand you people! How can you say you believe in God and … and be what you are—do what you do? You … you’re an educated person, that’s easy to see. You have to know communism has failed—even in Cuba. Your cause is lost. You’ll never win. And if you believe in God, you have to believe in right and wrong too. How can you justify war and fighting and killing and … and murder?”

  She’d gone too far, Julie recognized immediately. Enrique’s expression hardened, and the firm line of his mouth curved in that unpleasant tilt she’d seen before as he answered deliberately, “You talk like a civilian. It is not murder for a soldier to fight—and even at times to be forced to kill—for his country and people. You civilians are always the same! If there is fighting, you are quick to call for those with guns to stand between you and your enemy. As soon as the fighting is over, you begin to point your fingers and call those who risked their lives in your defense ‘killers’ and ‘murderers.’ I became a soldier …” He stopped. “I became a guerrilla, because I believe in what I do. I believe that what I am doing is the best—maybe the only—chance this country has to find peace and justice. And as for believing in God, the very pages of the Scriptures are full of soldiers who fought for their country and their God.”

  Enrique broke off abruptly, as though he’d said more than he’d intended. Rising in one fluid motion to his feet, he walked away with long, rapid strides. Julie watched his departure with unwilling interest as he disappeared down the path toward the river. However mistaken the man might be, there had been real feeling, even passion, in his answer.

  “What is Enrique’s story?” she asked curiously. “What brought him to join the guerrillas? Was his family killed by paramilitaries too?”

  Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know. He was transferred here not long ago from another front. Up north.”

  “And Comandante Aguilera?” Enrique was out of sight now, and Julie turned her head to look at Carlos. “Why does he hate us so much? The Americans, I mean. And some of the others hate us too—like Rafael. I don’t understand it. If their families and villages are being massacred by other Colombians, why should they turn around and hate us? We haven’t done anything to hurt them.”

  Julie could see the boy’s hesitation. He shrugged. “I have heard it said that Comandante Aguilera’s father was one of the leftist leaders when the americanos … the see … eee … ah”—he gave the abbreviation for the Central Intelligence Agency its Spanish pronunciation, as Aguilera had—“first began to train the paramilitares to fight the guerrillas. Have you heard of this?”

  Julie nodded. The CIA’s involvement with the self-defense groups had been short-lived, and the agency certainly had never endorsed the groups’ degeneration into random violence, but the guerrillas were hardly likely to appreciate that distinction, and she already had an unpleasant feeling where this was going.

  Carlos went on, “I have heard that he was but a child when they gunned his father down in front of him. They say Comandante Aguilera has never forgiven the americanos.”

  Julie let out a tired sigh. So many sad stories. So much hatred. No wonder it was so hard to break the cycle of violence! How could people be expected to forgive such atrocities against the people they loved? And yet they would have to if this was ever to end.

  “And what about you, Carlos?” she asked quietly. “Do you think Enrique is right—that God approves of all this killing and murder? On all sides? Do you really think your family—Gabriela—would want you to avenge them by killing other innocent people who just got in the way of your war?

  “Can’t you see?” she pleaded. “Someone has to be willing to just let it go!”

  “I …” The young face was suddenly troubled. His eyes slid sideways to Julie, then dropped. “I have not yet killed anyone,” he mumbled to his assault rifle, and there was both defense and shame in the admission.

  “Carlos! Enough! She is not your compañera.” The camp leader had returned from the latrine and was standing over the young guerrilla. Flushing at the caustic comment, Carlos stumbled to his feet. Victor paused only to turn off the Coleman lamp before striding toward his shelter with a curt command over his shoulder. “Rafael, your shift.”

  Rafael, like Jaime, showed no inclination to talk on duty, which suited Julie fine. Tugging her thin blanket over her shoulders, she buried her head in her arms to get away from that baleful glare.

  She couldn’t as easily shut out the images evoked by Carlos’s story. How was it she had never wondered what had happened to San Ignacio after she left? She could probably have found out over these last years if she’d made any effort. Other journalists had interviewed the guerrillas in this zone. Groups like C-PAP had been in and out. Julie had been too wrapped up in her misfortune to even consider that the people from whom she’d walked away without a backward glance might be undergoing tragedies of their own. It had hurt to believe what she had thought to be their betrayal. The reality of pain and anguish and senseless violence, the images of which she could picture only too well in her mind’s eye, hurt far more.

  As senseless as lying in a guerrilla camp with a guard at the foot of my bed. Feeling Rafael’s flashlight play over her in response to her shuddering breath, Julie forced back fresh tears, turning her thoughts into a new channel. No matter how she wracked her brain, she still could make no sense out of any of this. No, by all rules of logic, her first assessment should have been correct. Whatever infractions she and Tim had committed, it had been in the best interests of the guerrillas to treat them as guests, not enemies. The only reasonable reaction to their offense would have been to return them with a reprimand to the airport.

  Except for this spy thing.

  And that was what it all came down to. Why were the guerrillas so sure she was a spy? Why would anyone want to spy on these people anyway? The life and activities of the guerillas were well-documented, after all, by reporters if not government sources. What did they think she could learn down here that could possibly hurt their cause?

  And who had fingered Julie to the guerrillas? The question replayed itself endlessly in Julie’s mind. The two guerrillas on the plane—or someone else? Who were these musulmanes she’d heard Comandante Aguilera refer to through her drugged stupor? Come to think of it, wasn’t Kharrazi a Middle Eastern name?

  But no. Sondra had been genuinely affected by her encounter with the dead environmentalists. Julie herself was witness of that. The woman’s pallor and her icy hands could not have been faked.

  So why can’t both be true? Even a spy might be unnerved by the sight—and smell—of decomposing human bodies. The NBC correspondent had hung around Julie from the beginning, and there was that Middle Eastern name. Maybe, for all that outward frivolity, Sondra Kharrazi had another cause besid
es the rainforest.

  Julie stiffened so suddenly that Rafael’s flashlight clicked on again, the light playing over that part of her face not buried in her arms. Was it possible she’d just stumbled over the key to this puzzle? Not the guerrillas, but these Muslim friends of Comandante Aguilera, whoever they were? Hadn’t she overheard something in that haziness of the truth drug wearing off about being afraid the Americans would find out what was going on out here? So why the Americans and not the Colombians? Unless …

  Unless it’s something that affects Americans.

  Sudden excitement gripped Julie, driving away personal fears and sorrow. That was it—it had to be! These Middle Eastern terrorist allies of the guerrillas were planning some big attack involving American presence in the country. Something so big even Comandante Aguilera had not been trusted with the details. Maybe San José and Colonel Thornton’s operation there? Or somewhere else. Whatever their plan, it was something they were afraid the Americans could—and would—stop if they found it out.

  I’ve got to get out of here and warn them!

  Julie raised her head cautiously in the dark. The shelter was built like a tent, open at both ends. With the jungle canopy overhead blocking out even the dim light of moon and stars, she couldn’t see, but she knew that the endless cover of underbrush and trees lay only a few meters away. If she could escape into that …

  Rafael’s flashlight probed her shelter again, and the excitement abruptly ebbed. Who am I kidding? These people were experts at kidnapping—the best in the world by many assessments. If she couldn’t even twitch in her bed without drawing attention, how was she to slip unnoticed from her shelter and into the jungle? Nor could Julie hope that those weapons out there were just for show. If she failed in her bid for escape, she had no doubt that Rafael at least would positively enjoy using that assault rifle or the pistol he fondled with such affection, to gun her down.

  And even if she didn’t fail—what about Tim? Victor had made it clear that he would be shot if she escaped. Was she to risk his life, wherever he might be right now, to pass on—what? Some vague reference to Muslim allies? The U.S. government had to be as well aware as she that the guerrillas had contacts with Islamic terrorist groups. Her own unclassified research, which had brought her so much trouble with Aguilera, had given her that much. And surely Colonel Thornton and the rest of the American military leadership were aware that they were a target of the guerrillas.

  Besides, even if she made it out of the camp, how would she ever find her way out of the jungle itself? She hadn’t the slightest idea where she was. The rainforest was vast, and Julie knew better than most that the only predators to face out there would not be the two-legged kind.

  No! Julie let the rigidity ebb from her body. She would not compound one stupid blunder with another. If some miracle opened a reasonable opportunity for escape, she’d take it in a flash. In the meantime, she’d do what countless other guerrilla hostages had been forced to do. Wait.

  At some endless point later, Julie slept.

  FOURTEEN

  THE BOREDOM WAS THE WORST, Julie had decided by the second week. Every day began the same. A pleasurable wakening to the freshness of the jungle dawn, the odor of wood smoke and brewing coffee, the morning chorus of birds and monkeys. Familiar scents and sounds, even loved. Then a glimpse of mottled green and brown and the metallic gray of an assault-rifle barrel, and the feeling of well-being would evaporate like the lingering coolness that burned off as soon as the sun rose.

  Breakfast was invariably coffee and arepas. The rest of the day stretched endlessly ahead, with nothing to mark the long hours but dinner and supper. Julie found herself anticipating these as she had never looked forward to meals before, just to break up the day, though again the food rarely varied from rice and beans or sancocho, with an occasional piece of meat added to the pot if one of the guerrillas had gone out hunting.

  Victor did not again prohibit the guerrillas from talking to Julie. But besides Carlos himself, only Alberto and Marcela showed any inclination to friendliness, and even these three grew visibly uneasy if Julie dragged them into too long a conversation. Since she didn’t want to focus unwelcome attention on them, Julie soon learned to limit her communication to a minimum. After that first night, she wasn’t invited again to join the guerrillas’ evening activities.

  Nor was she allowed to help around camp, though by the second day she had begged Marcela to let her assist with the kitchen chores. It was Victor who vetoed her offer, shouting at the young girl that the prisoner was not permitted to move around the encampment. The camp leader seemed to have his eye on Julie at all times, and even an overly long trip to the latrine could trigger an eruption of anger.

  Julie spent most of her day sitting cross-legged on the pallet in her shelter, fanning herself with a palm leaf against the humid heat. When her muscles protested that position, she stretched out on the thin mattress, pretending to be asleep. For a person who had always taken pride in filling her days with productive output, the idleness was a worse torture than the mosquitoes.

  These continued to plague Julie and everyone else in the camp. Her capture had occurred at the tail end of the wet season, and in a few weeks the rains would be gone and with them the mosquitoes. In the meantime, there continued to be at least one good downpour almost every day, and if the rain itself washed away the mosquitoes and brought momentary relief to the heat, it was always followed by an increased insect population, as though the puddles left standing after the rain were breeding tanks for them.

  Julie’s bottle of repellant ran out after the first few days, and after a day without, she was desperate enough to submit to what the others were doing. They had brought along one of those flit gun sprayers filled with Baygon and at intervals sprayed it over their clothing, rubbing the residue into hands and face. What toxins could be seeping through her skin from the stuff, Julie chose not to think about, and at least it brought some temporary relief.

  The guerrillas were no less bored than Julie herself. In the mornings they kept busy with chores and added camp improvements, digging a new latrine and garbage pit every two days, taking turns at hunting details that brought in lapa, a rodentlike animal that made delicious stew, and on one occasion a wild pig which Linda and Marcela roasted over the fire. That night they’d had a feast.

  In the afternoons when the sun turned the lingering dampness into a sauna, the guerrillas just lay around the camp. A few hammocks had been strung under the trees, and the guerrillas napped, rocking themselves lazily by pulling at a rope hung from a nearby branch. They read magazines and books as well, somewhat to Julie’s surprise. Picking a pamphlet off the ground on her way back from the latrine, Julie discovered it to be a discussion of Karl Marx and his theories on world economics.

  The guerrillas spent considerable time cleaning their weapons, breaking them down, oiling and buffing the pieces, and putting them back together again. These were not all the uniform assault rifles as Julie had thought, and with time she learned their names. The AK-47s were the most common. These were Russian-built assault rifles of a quality that seldom broke down, Carlos explained to her, donated in the earlier days of their struggle by like-minded comrades from Cuba. There were a few Israeli Galils as well, automatic rifles that to Julie differed little from an assault rifle. Victor himself carried an M1 assault rifle, American made, that he bragged he’d taken from the wreckage of a military helicopter he’d shot down.

  They had hand grenades, too, and Semtex, a plastic explosive from which Victor and Jaime were training the younger guerrillas to fashion homemade bombs. It made Julie nervous to be even meters away while they fiddled around with detonators and lengths of fuse.

  Julie was learning other new vocabulary as well. The little shelters in which they slept were called caletas. The larger huts with plastic for walls were cambuches. One of these had been erected to shelter the radio and to store supplies out of the rain, and on wet evenings, the guerrillas—all but the one o
n current guard duty—gathered there to listen to their transistor radio and Victor’s political lectures.

  These were like a well-worn record of Comandante Aguilera’s speech. The rich oppressing the poor. The guerrillas as champions and saviors of the people. The perfidy of the Colombian government, along with a hodgepodge of Marxist philosophies and communist political propaganda. Julie was frightened by the intensity and the hate in the camp leader’s tone.

  There was anti-American rhetoric as well, as though every problem Colombia faced was somehow a product of U.S. government policy, and when the weather was good enough for the lectures to be held around the campfire, Julie could feel all eyes turn accusingly in her direction.

  Victor also held lectures on hygiene and first aid. These guerrillas were fanatics when it came to their rules of cleanliness—the only way to keep their combatants healthy in these jungle conditions—and Julie had seen Victor actually pull a gun on Rafael when the garbage wasn’t buried properly, and reduce Linda and Marcela to tears when the drinking water had not been boiled the requisite twenty minutes.

  The lack of privacy was almost as bad as the boredom. The thatched roof and open sides of the caleta were high enough to keep Julie in plain view at all times, and the guards never took their eyes off her, even if they were in conversation with another guerrilla who had stopped by their post to chat. When Julie had to go to the latrine, either Linda or Marcela, the younger guerrilla girl, stood over her, weapon leveled down at her, until she was finished. It was horribly humiliating, especially when one of the men was on duty and she had to ask permission for one of the women to take her.

  After the first day, Julie complained to Carlos that she was going to get sick if she didn’t get some exercise. He must have repeated it to Victor. The next morning the camp leader decreed that she was to have a daily exercise period. For a half-hour each afternoon, she trudged around the perimeter of the camp in a large circle, her guard at her heels. Like a dog on a leash. She ignored the glances, both amused and hostile, that followed her circuit. It was keeping her muscles in usable condition, and that was all that mattered.