The DMZ Read online

  Julie should have been overjoyed, but she felt stunned. Was it really going to be this easy? And what about Tim? Had she with her careless words traded her own release for his?

  Aguilera’s next words didn’t allay this concern. “The rest of you will tear down the camp, then return to San Ignacio as well to await my next orders. The man will return with me. It will not be necessary to stay the night after all, so I will be leaving camp shortly. But first—Victor, I will use your radio.”

  And that had been it. As she was led back to her caleta, Julie looked around for Tim. His guards had permitted him to swing up onto his horse rather than stand, and he was sitting there easily while the guards checked over harness and saddles on the other horses.

  “I have to say goodbye to my friend,” Julie informed Rafael, and without waiting for permission, she walked quickly across the camp. After all, he could hardly shoot her now.

  Tim swung down from the horse’s back as Julie approached. Without glancing at his guards, Julie demanded tensely, “Tim, why are they keeping you? Is it …?” Her voice dropped. “Do you think it’s what I said? If … if they think you’re the spy, they may kill you!”

  Dropping his reins, Tim turned to look down at Julie. His blue eyes holding hers were uncharacteristically grave in the light of campfire and lantern, but there was a half smile on his firm mouth as he shook his head. “Julie, you’re worrying for nothing. I’m sorry to disillusion you, but you’re wrong on all accounts. I’m not what you think, and I’ve got plenty of published articles on these parts to prove it. Don’t you worry about me. Just go on home—get out that warning of yours, if you feel it’s urgent. Me—I’ll be fine, believe me! Besides, I’ve got God on my side, remember?”

  The quiet assurance in his voice was convincing. Julie studied his face, her head tilted far back against the height of his tall frame. Had she misread him? Whoever lived behind those handsome, confident features, Tim McAdams wasn’t a person to dismiss lightly. If he was who—or rather, what—Julie suspected, maybe he really would be fine. In fact, he might be a lot better off with Julie out of the way. Without her, maybe he’d even be able to complete whatever he’d come here to do.

  And if she was wrong?

  Then maybe God really will protect him. Either way, there’s nothing I can do. And if Comandante Aguilera is really decent enough to send me home, maybe I’ve been worrying about Tim and everything else for nothing.

  The radio session in the cambuche had broken up, and Comandante Aguilera and the rest of his party were striding toward them. Victor was with them, listening with grim expression to the comandante’s low, rapid speech. He shot Julie a black glance as they approached. So someone at least wasn’t happy about her release. The camp leader brought up Aguilera’s horse for him, then stalked away.

  Swinging back to his saddle, Tim looked down at Julie, the half smile still on his lips. “Goodbye, Julie Baker,” he’d said softly. “And don’t you worry. This will all be over before you know it, I promise.”

  Julie stood watching until the night swallowed up the riders, then allowed Rafael to lead her back to her caleta. She still felt stunned and disbelieving. Was it really possible that this time tomorrow she might be on her way home?

  The guerrillas themselves were in a mood of jubilation, laughing and singing around the campfire. They too were looking forward to freedom from this jungle confinement. All except Carlos, who had seemed morose, not joining the others but retiring early to his caleta.

  Is he still worrying about having to fight? Julie wondered. It had been late before she herself fell asleep. Perhaps that was why it had taken so much to wake her up.

  * * *

  Now, though, she was wide awake.

  “When?” she got out in the same breath of a whisper. “How?”

  The “why” she didn’t ask. Her release had seemed too good to be true, and so it had been. They couldn’t afford to release her—not because of any vague warning she might give about some unknown plan, but because she could give the lie to all their stories and witness to Tim’s continued captivity. How had she ever entertained for a second the hope that they might free her?

  “Today when they take you away,” he answered. “I heard them talking—Victor, Enrique, and the comandante. They do not plan to take you to San Ignacio but into the jungle, where you will be shot and left.”

  So that chill of a death sentence she had felt last night under Enrique’s narrowed gaze had been real—and addressed at her. A surge of fear and panic drove the breath from Julie’s lungs. With it came an unexpected pang of hurt and disappointment. Had she forgotten that Enrique Martinez was a killer, passionately dedicated to a cause that held human life cheap?

  Yet the hurt was uppermost in Julie’s mind, more than the mortal danger she faced. However quixotic his reasons, Enrique had twice intervened on her behalf and had treated her with humanity and even kindness. She had hoped … what had she hoped?

  Okay, so you hoped he’d get soft just because he could show some decency to a prisoner. Like he said, he’s not a barbarian. Just a soldier who takes orders, whether it’s to keep the prisoner safe one day or to kill her the next.

  To think she’d thought Enrique less calloused than Victor and Rafael and the others! But he could plan a cold-blooded execution while allowing her to hope she was actually going home.

  All that was irrelevant now, and Julie thrust away both hurt and panic to breathe out the most important question. “What do I do?”

  Surely Carlos hadn’t awakened her in the middle of the night just to provide her with this information. Though it was no longer full night, Julie discovered, catching a glimpse of the phosphorescent numbers on her watch face. It was past 4:00 A.M., and in another hour or so, the camp would begin to stir. An hour after that, she and Victor and Enrique and Rafael would be embarking on that final—very final—jungle trek. The panic rose up again into her throat.

  “We go—as though to the latrine. Now!”

  Carlos rose noiselessly from his squatting position. Julie reached over to snag her belongings, an easy matter since she’d kept her knapsack packed and ready ever since that last horrid dash into the jungle, and crawled out after him, wincing as the palm leaves under her mattress rustled. Rising stealthily to her feet, she froze, listening.

  There was no answering stir among the sleepers. Obeying Carlos’s tap on her shoulder, she stepped silently in front of him onto the path feet had worn to the edge of the encampment. She had immediately grasped his plan. If anyone challenged them, the prisoner had suffered a nighttime call of nature. The knapsack she’d have to explain by her needing some kind of toiletry or change of clothing, because she wasn’t about to leave it behind.

  And if no one stopped them, then when they arrived at the latrine, Julie could just keep on going. She had an hour before the camp stirred. She could be far away from this place by then. She wouldn’t even think about the other dangers that lay beyond.

  A surge of gratitude warmed Julie’s heart as she glanced back at the dark shape of the young guerrilla fighter behind her. Carlos, unlike Enrique, had in the end shown too much conscience to shut his eyes to her murder. Would he have made the same choice if Julie were not a girl he’d known since childhood? Maybe not, but at least he had chosen. If only her escape didn’t get him into too much trouble!

  Out here in the open, the red glow of the few remaining coals in the campfire made the darkness less complete, and the black shapes of the caletas and the packed dirt of the path under their feet were enough to guide Carlos and Julie to the edge of the encampment. Julie’s heart almost stopped as they passed the strung hammocks and Alberto stopped snoring to turn noisily over in his sleep. But the snoring resumed at once, and no one raised a voice to stop them.

  The latrine was newly dug, the path hardly yet worn through the brush, and Carlos had to turn his flashlight on to find their way. He pushed his way ahead of Julie, keeping his hand over the glass so the light filtering thro
ugh his fingers was too dim to be seen from behind. Julie herself had to keep a hand on his ammunition belt to keep from stumbling.

  The crude box shape of the latrine loomed before them. Beyond the glimmer of the flashlight dancing on its bamboo walls, Julie could sense more than see the black tangle of trees and vines and underbrush that was rainforest so dense and primeval it had rarely known human footfall, much less machete or axe. Once swallowed up in that vast wilderness, people disappeared forever, even when they wanted to be found. With any luck at all, Julie could be well beyond the reach of her pursuers long before dawn. But even as she took a step toward its welcome cover, she hesitated.

  “Are you sure about this, Carlos? If you let me go—won’t you get in trouble when they find out I’m gone?”

  The flashlight beam was still dimmed by his hand over the glass, but above the pale light filtering through his fingers, Julie caught the drawn lines of fear and strain even before his harsh whisper. “They will shoot me. I have seen it happen before when a prisoner escaped. I cannot go back. Besides …”—Carlos patted the gun barrel of his AK-47 with his free hand, and the bravado in his young voice wrenched at Julie’s heart even more than the fear in his face—“it would not be right to leave a woman to travel this jungle alone. You will need me to protect you. Come.”

  Pushing the assault rifle back over his shoulder, he reached for Julie’s knapsack, adding it to his load with a gallantry that touched Julie anew. But as he did so, his fingers slipped from the face of the flashlight, leaving the electric beam to flare up with a brilliance that brought a gasp from both of them. Carlos fumbled for the switch, and the light blinked out. The darkness closed in like a heavy black blanket as they stood again, frozen, listening.

  Once again it seemed they’d been fortunate. That flash of brilliance must have been visible in the camp only twenty meters away through the maze of hardwood trees, but they heard no stir to indicate that anyone had been awake to see it.

  “We will have to move without a light,” Carlos whispered, and the despair in his words echoed Julie’s.

  “How far will that get us?” she whispered back with vivid memories of her stumbling, groping trek from the airport to San Ignacio. There at least she’d had a path and some glimmer of moon and stars. “We won’t make it a kilometer if we have to feel our way through that!” And how soon before someone awakened to discover their missing guard and prisoner? They would be after them with lights that would not have to be shielded from searching eyes.

  Shielded.

  “Here, let me have that flashlight!” Julie fumbled in the darkness to remove the flashlight from Carlos’s hand, then slid her knapsack from his shoulder. “If we’re here to use the latrine, let me use it.”

  Pulling the rickety door shut after her, Julie switched on the flashlight, setting it face down to the ground to limit even the smallest seepage of light through the cracks in the bamboo walls. Hurriedly under its faint illumination, she rummaged through her knapsack. To do so, she had to shove together the two boards propped over the open hole and kneel on them, but she ignored both her precarious perch and the stench of the sewage below as she pulled out what Julie called her “survival kit”—a tight little package that stayed in her knapsack from one trip to the next and hadn’t been removed with notepad and computer. Extra pens. Super Glue. Scissors. Batteries for the recorder that had also been confiscated. A tiny sewing kit and some basic over-the-counter medications. And a roll of masking tape.

  Triumphantly, Julie snatched up the tape. Switching off the flashlight again, she propped it between her knees face up and hastily began ripping off lengths of tape, crisscrossing the glass lens with them until, at one too hasty movement, she lost her grip on the tape. A thick splash told her where it had landed. But it had served its purpose, and when Julie switched on the flashlight, only a faint glow made it through the thick layers of tape. Little more, in fact, than the luminescence of a clock face at night. It would be enough.

  Carlos was nervously pacing back and forth in front of the latrine as she emerged. His eyes widened with relieved approval when he saw what Julie had done. Reaching again for her knapsack, he nodded for Julie to go ahead with the flashlight, his AK-47 unslung and cradled across his chest as he followed hard on her heels, his nervous glance going continually back over his shoulder.

  The sounds of pursuit for which they braced themselves never came, and though the dim glow through the masking tape wasn’t enough to really illuminate their way, it allowed them to make out the next massive hardwood trunk and then the next. Their pace quickened as they grew accustomed to the faint glow marking the next step ahead of them, and with each added meter between them and the camp, the knot in Julie’s stomach eased and Carlos looked less frequently over his shoulder.

  Dawn came not with the pinks and oranges of open sky but as a gradual lightening to gray, almost imperceptible at first, until Julie realized suddenly her light was no longer leaving any impression on the tree trunk in front of her. When they could see each other clearly, Carlos stored the flashlight away in Julie’s knapsack, and they quickened their pace until they were moving almost at a trot.

  “They will be awake now,” Carlos told Julie, and he no longer bothered to whisper. “But I do not think they will be able to overtake us. Even if they can follow our tracks—and Jaime at least knows the ways of the woods—it will take them much time to trace the way we have gone.”

  Not long afterward, it began to rain.

  Though it didn’t last long, it was a thorough downpour, one of the last torrential gasps of the rainy season, thundering like a percussion band on the jungle canopy overhead and dumping rivulets of water down palm fronds and tangles of vines. Soon they were both soaked through. But for once Julie minded neither the wet nor the mud, for the same thought was in her mind that Carlos voiced as he surveyed the rushing streams the rain had left across their back trail.

  “They will never catch us now. Our tracks will be washed away so that not even Jaime can find them again.”

  The utter relief in his voice and the sudden relaxing of the drawn lines of his face told Julie he’d been less confident of their escape than he’d given her to believe. Julie herself felt almost giddy with the release of fear. After all the weeks of captivity, the gradual acceptance that she might never be released, the shock of that death sentence, and these last hours of forced march with every sense straining back over her shoulder for the pursuit that was certain to come, it didn’t seem possible she was really free. She wanted to shatter the jungle’s quiet with her jubilation or let loose a torrent of pent-up tears. Instead, she leaned against a tree trunk and said dazedly, “I … I just can’t believe it. We really did it!”

  Her head turned sideways to where Carlos was already using the halt to check his weapon for water damage. “No, you did it,” she said quietly. “Carlos, I … there just aren’t words enough for what you’ve done.”

  A dark flush rose up to stain his cheekbones, and as he shook his head in mute denial, she had mercy on his discomfiture and added matter-of-factly, “So what do we do now? Do you have any idea where we are, Carlos? Or how we’re going to find our way out of here?”

  The relief fled from his face. His eyes dropped to the ground, and Julie saw the budding Adam’s apple on his throat move before he raised his eyes to admit resolutely, “Señorita Julia, I … I was not giving any thought to where we were going. I thought only of escape. I … I am afraid we are lost.”

  His dejection was clear, and Julie hastened to reassure him. “It’s okay, Carlos. You’ve done well—incredibly well! Think of it this way. If we don’t know where we are, they won’t either.”

  Pushing up the sleeve of her fatigues, Julie checked her watch. Seven-thirty. They’d been pushing through the jungle for almost three hours. No wonder she was tired.

  “Do you think it’s safe to take a break?”

  Wiping the AK-47 with his shirt, Carlos restored the weapon to his shoulder. “Perhaps
it would be best. While we decide what to do.”

  For a spot to break their trek, it wasn’t a bad choice. The umbrella canopy of the hardwoods through which they had come had kept the underbrush scarce and allowed them to see back through the trees the way they had come. Directly ahead not twenty meters away, Julie could see blue sky between two tall trunks and with it a resultant explosion of plant life. Ferns and elephant ears—not the dainty versions sold back home as house plants but towering higher than a man. And beyond them, a glimpse of reeds and tall grasses.

  That much vegetation could only mean a slough. The jungle swamps, choked with grass and floating hummocks of vegetation and infested with water snakes and crocodiles, could extend for kilometers. Carlos and Julie would have to turn to the right or to the left to circumvent it.

  In the meantime, the simple dance of sunlight on leaves and tree trunks did much to lift Julie’s spirits. Nearby to her right, an enormous tropical cedar that had stood at the edge of the slough lay toppled to the ground, felled either by storm or disease. The opening its fall had left in the canopy had allowed the tangle of ferns and elephant ears to proliferate along its rotting length, promising cover if they should need it.

  Now why am I thinking of that? We’ve lost them.

  But the thought dimmed some of Julie’s lifted spirits. Sinking down onto the ground, she leaned wearily against a protruding root. Carlos stood beside her, the AK-47 cradled in his hands as though he were still on guard. This time his surveillance was directed outward instead of at Julie, his eyes roving constantly from side to side, an indication that he too felt a lingering unease.

  Julie’s stomach cramped from hunger as well as tension, reminding her of other problems they had as well. To quiet her fears, she said quickly, “Tell me, Carlos, now that we have a minute. How did you find out? That they were going to kill me, I mean—Enrique and the others.”