The DMZ Read online

  Carlos made one last scan of their back trail before dropping down to the root beside her, lowering the AK-47 to rest across his knees. “I heard them. In the cambuche. After Rafael replaced me as guard. I … I have never disobeyed the comandante before. But I could not believe he would come only to bring supplies or to order your release when any of his men could have done so. When he did not even ask to interrogate you, I … I grew afraid. And so when I was released from duty, I did what is forbidden and slipped up in the dark behind the cambuche to listen. That is how I found that I was right to be afraid. El comandante told the others—Victor and Enrique and Jaime—that it had been determined you were indeed not the spy they had thought and that he could no longer waste fighters to guard you. He said you could not be released because he had told your government the paramilitares had you, so you would have to be disposed of. It was Enrique who said they should take you away from the camp and dispose of you there.”

  Enrique! So much for any illusions that he’d harbored any friendly thoughts toward her.

  “Enrique said it might be troubling for some of the guards to see you killed. That sometimes the guards grew attached to their captives and that it would be better to take you away before disposing of you.” Carlos slid his glance away from Julie. “I … I think he meant me because I once knew you. And perhaps some of the others. In any case, the comandante said this was what he also had in mind. He said it would be announced that you were to be released, so you would go quietly when the time came.”

  That rat! Julie thought bitterly, and whether she was thinking of the FARC commander or Enrique, she wasn’t sure. “And what about Tim?”

  She hadn’t had time during the terror of their escape and their mad dash through the jungle to give more than a fleeting thought to her fellow prisoner. Now she had the leisure to wonder—and worry—about his welfare. He’d practically ordered Julie not to try to escape. But that was before the alternative had been death. Would they still punish him? Or had he too, unknowingly, already been condemned to death?

  Carlos was shaking his head. “I heard a noise then and was afraid of being seen, so I slipped away. But though nothing was said, I think some of the others knew the truth. I heard Linda laughing with Rafael, and it was your name they spoke. Nor do I think they cared about your death. I wanted to warn you then, but it was not my turn to guard. Then Marcela asked that I take the early morning watch for her because she wished to stay with Victor before he left the camp, and I knew then what I would do. But I still had to wait until Rafael, who was on guard before me, was deep asleep before I could awaken you.”

  Julie swallowed. So modestly he’d dismissed his own courage. Not to mention the agonizing choice it had to have been between the comrades who had become his new family and a condemned prisoner to whom he owed nothing but a childhood acquaintance. How much easier—and certainly safer—it would have been just to shut eyes and ears and let her disappear out of his life.

  “You saved my life,” she said again. “I can never thank you enough. But what are you going to do now? Do you still believe in what Comandante Aguilera is doing? Are … are you going to go back to fighting?”

  He looked away, and his adolescent Adam’s apple rose and fell before he said softly, “Comandante Aguilera has been kind to me—like a father in the time after the paramilitares butchered my family. He gave me food and shelter and a new life, and I will always be grateful to him for that. But in this he is wrong. I still believe in what the revolution teaches. I believe the social wrongs and the injustice that plague our country must be addressed if there is ever to be peace. But not like this—I see that now. If the comandante will have an innocent woman killed just because you are not convenient to his plans, then he will do other things that are unjust as well. And so will the other guerrillas. How can they bring peace to Colombia any more than those who already practice corruption and injustice in high places?”

  He swallowed again. “No, I will not go back to the revolution. I … I miss my family, but I do not want anymore to kill. You were right. It will not bring them back. And it is not how my family would wish me to avenge their deaths.” His young face looked suddenly forlorn, like a lost child. “I do not know what I will do. It has been so long—I can hardly remember a life without fighting and training and running. Perhaps … what I would truly wish to do is to return to school. To become the professional my father hoped I would be someday. But …”—he lifted his shoulders in what was meant to be indifference but failed—“what future is there in this world for one who has been a guerrilla? The authorities would never permit it.”

  Julie’s throat tightened as she looked up at the young man sitting on the root just above her. Carlos had seen his family murdered, had spent the years that should have been his youth fighting a bloody war for a losing cause, had learned to face up unflinchingly to hardship and hunger and pain, and had developed a multitude of other skills that were valueless in the more civilized world in which Julie had spent the last seven years.

  Yet despite the camouflage fatigues and the combat cap and the almost frightening air of competence with which he handled that AK-47, he was only seventeen years old. A child still with a whole life stretching before him. A life that would hold more than rage and bitterness and painful memories if she, Julie Baker, had anything to do with it.

  “You will,” she told him softly. “You will go to school and to university, and you will have a future in this country or any other you choose if I have to turn two state departments on end to make it happen.”

  A sudden light flared in Carlos’s eyes, and for a moment his young face was alive with warring hope and disbelief. “You can really do that, Señorita Julia?”

  The jerk of his body came simultaneously with the clap of gunfire.

  It was so unexpected that Julie’s mind at first refused to process it. Then another fury of thunder stitched a row of bullet wounds across the tree trunk above her head. Scrambling to her feet, Julie rolled rather than dove after Carlos over the root where they had been sitting. As she hit the ground, she caught a glimpse of dappled green and olive detaching itself from a tree to their left. Above it Linda’s face twisted in malevolent triumph. Julie froze behind the inadequate cover of the root system as Linda raised her Galil automatic rifle again.

  Then Carlos’s AK-47 came up beside her, and his answering blast almost deafened Julie’s ears. A scream rose from the trees to their left, and Linda ducked under cover. But the scream had been of rage, not pain, so Julie didn’t think Carlos had hit anything. Obeying his frantic gesture, Julie rose and sprinted toward the nearest cover—the fallen cedar with its explosion of vegetation overgrowing it. Carlos was right behind her, running awkwardly backward so that he was facing the attack. As Julie scrambled under a tangle of ferns, he let loose another long burst of gunfire before diving in beside her, and this time the rat-tat-tat that responded came not from Linda’s Galil, but another AK-47 or an M-16.

  Where had they come from? Julie wondered, twisting around to look back. Even if the guerrillas had been hard on their heels from the beginning—and surely she and Carlos would have seen some glimmer of searchlights if that were the case—they should have had more of a respite than this. It was simply impossible. And yet there they were!

  As Carlos dropped to his belly and slammed another clip into his assault rifle, Julie saw them, pushing through the belt of reeds and grass and elephant ears that marked the edge of the swamp. Rafael had a machete and was chopping a path with one hand while the AK-47 in his other sprayed an indiscriminate volley of gunfire into the air. Stepping out from behind him, Victor and Jaime sprinted for cover behind the nearest tree trunk, their weapons up and blazing. Farther in, where Julie had seen Linda, she spotted Alberto and Enrique racing forward in a zigzag pattern through the trees.

  No wonder they had so quickly overtaken the fugitives. The guerrilla band hadn’t followed Carlos and Julie’s trail at all. Instead, they had evidently taken the much fa
ster route of the waterways, following the rivers up into the swamp either by boat or dugout canoe. They had radios to whistle up men and equipment. But how in all the universe had they known where to intercept their escaped prisoners when even Julie and Carlos hadn’t known where they were running?

  The two fugitives were hidden from view, the ferns overhead swallowing them up in a lacy green arch. But their pursuers knew where they had gone to ground. Julie heard Victor’s shout. Then a line of camouflage fatigues, hardly visible against the vegetation, began to flit forward among the tall columns of the trees.

  Carlos let loose another spray of bullets. He was deliberately aiming high, Julie realized as she saw the bits of bark fly well above the heads of the oncoming guerrillas. But the blast had the effect of freezing their advance. As the running figures dove for cover, Julie heard Victor’s harsh order. “Enrique—go left! Rafael—to the right!”

  “They are afraid to come in after us now,” Carlos whispered urgently. “They will circle to cut us off instead. We must reach the other side first. Now, go! We do not have long!”

  Motioning frantically for her to move, Carlos raised his AK-47 to his shoulder again. As Julie scrambled deeper into the underbrush, he let loose a final round before crawling after her. It wasn’t easy to move fast, Julie found. The very explosion of life that curved fern fronds and elephant ears above their heads had left a tangle of other growth to choke their pathvines and other thorny plants that snatched at Julie’s feet and tore at her clothes, pressing in around her. Sometimes she was running forward at a half crouch while other times she was forced to her hands and knees or even to her belly as she wormed her way under a tangle of vines.

  Julie could hear Carlos at her heels, his breathing loud and raspy as though the pace of their escape had taken more out of him than she had realized, but she dared not pause even to glance over her shoulder. She weighed their options as she pushed onward. The fallen cedar was far bigger in circumference than a man was tall, and they would have to abandon their cover to climb over it. They had entered the underbrush where the crown of the huge tree had hit the ground, and while its branches were choked and tangled with the plant life that had grown up through them, the branches themselves were no thicker here than a normal tree trunk. Julie was able to scramble alternatively over and under them. If they could get through this labyrinth to the other side …

  What then?

  Pushing aside a riot of orchids that would have brought a fortune in a florist shop, Julie stepped across a limb to find herself in an open space created by the fork of two large branches. Breaking with relief into a run, she was halfway across the V-shaped break in the maze when she realized Carlos was no longer at her heels. She glanced back to see him lift his leg with an audible grunt to clear the log she had crossed, his shoulders bowed under the weight of her knapsack and his assault rifle and the heavy ammo vest he was wearing. Julie was reminded with sudden guilt that he had been carrying the full weight of their possessions. No wonder he was tired!

  She caught sight of his face and saw with a shock that his grunt was not from exhaustion but pain. She saw the dark stain soaking through the camouflage material of his pant leg.

  “Carlos, you’re hurt!” Racing back to his side, Julie helped him ease his leg over the log, then caught him as he slumped to the ground on the other side. “You’re bleeding! Why didn’t you tell me you’d been hit?”

  “It was when we ran for cover. It … it is nothing—just a scratch.” Carlos struggled to his feet, and Julie saw with alarm the drops of fresh scarlet on the ground where he was standing and another trail of red marking the branch he had just crossed as well as the broken twigs and leaves he had cut across before it.

  “Carlos, you can’t go on like this. You’re losing blood badly!”

  Already Julie was pushing him back to the ground, and it was a sign of his weakness that he didn’t resist but slumped with a groan of pain to the tangle of orchids and moss that carpeted the open V between the forked branches. Easing her knapsack from his shoulder, Julie rooted frantically inside until she found what she was looking for—the silk slip she had tucked in along with her one dress for that possible special occasion that had never arisen.

  Ripping the slip right up to its elastic band to double its length, she slipped it under his pant leg above where the blood stained the cloth and yanked it tight. She was probably doing it all wrong, but the rapidity with which the stain was spreading and the bloodless pallor of his face terrified her. Rooting again in her knapsack, Julie found the scissors from her survival kit and slit open his pant leg just below the tourniquet. Carlos bit into his lip hard enough to bring back the color as she ripped away the material, but he made no other sound.

  What lay underneath was even worse than Julie had anticipated. Yanking out the dress that was to have gone with the slip, she pressed it to the wound. The dress had been a dainty cream affair, and Julie had to bite back her despair while the tourniquet above the wound immediately turned crimson. She was reaching for another article of clothing when Carlos stopped her with a hand on hers.

  “There is no time for this. Listen! We have been still too long, and I … I am afraid they have been following my trail. They know where we are, and they are coming in after us.”

  He was right. Julie could hear it too as she lifted her head to listen. A rustle that was not the wind sounded from a patch of elephant ears beyond the labyrinth of branches. Then the sharp snap of a twig under someone’s boot. Emboldened by their long silence, the guerrillas were closing in on them. Struggling to a sitting position, Carlos rested his AK-47 on the log and fired off a burst. A loud curse followed, then silence. Carlos slumped back with a groan. “That will not hold them long. You must go before they try again.”

  “I … I don’t think we can, Carlos!” Her makeshift pressure bandage had finally stemmed the flow of blood, but Julie didn’t dare lift her hands from it lest it start again. “There is no way you can walk on this.”

  “I know I can’t.” His voice was suddenly wooden, his face without expression as Julie glanced in surprise. “Even if I could walk, I would only hold you back. That is why you must go on without me.”

  “But …” Julie stared at him in dismay. “How can I? They’ll take you prisoner!”

  “They’ll take us both prisoner if you don’t!”

  Julie shook her head in disbelief. How could he be so calm about this—as though he were the adult instead of her? “But Carlos, you said they’d shoot you! There’s no way I’m going to leave you to them! Not even if they catch both of us again.”

  “But you must!” The adult reasonableness of his tone dissolved into urgency. “If they catch you, they will kill you for sure! And me—I exaggerated. Remember that the comandante has been as a father to me. They will take me prisoner, to be sure. Punish me perhaps. But shoot me—no, that would be too much. Now, please …” His young face twisted suddenly with an anguish that was not just the pain of his injury. “Go, Señorita Julia! Do not make all of this for nothing. You cannot help me by staying. At least let me know my help has not been in vain.”

  He was right, and Julie knew she should go, if only to get out that warning and the news that Tim was in captivity, and because there was an old man whose heart was breaking over her loss. She could do nothing by being caught again, but she could accomplish much with her freedom. That didn’t make the doing of it easier.

  Julie bent her head over the bloody cloth beneath her hands, and with tears burning in her eyes she whispered desolately, “Oh, Carlos, this is all my fault! If only I hadn’t come here! I was so determined to get my big story—and I didn’t really think about anything else or anyone. And now I’ve hurt so many people by coming here. I … I just can’t bear it if something happens to you too!”

  Carlos dropped a hand from the barrel of the AK-47 to cover hers, and though it was sticky with blood, its grip was surprisingly strong. “No, don’t say that. Don’t ever say that. You, Señorit
a Julia, you cannot know what it has meant to me that you came. All these years, so many long years since … since my family, it seemed to me as though God had left me too, as though He were so far away that I would never find Him again. And I have been so afraid! Afraid of killing. Afraid I would not have the courage to kill when I had to. Afraid that one day I would look down the barrel of my gun and find someone that I knew in its sights. And then—you walked down from that plane.”

  The wonder in his voice drew Julie’s head up, startled. “When you came, it was as though God Himself leaned down from heaven to say, ‘See, Carlos, I haven’t forgotten you.’ You gave me hope that there was another way, another life than killing. Señorita Julia, you are here because God sent you to me. I know this as surely as I know that I live.”

  Julie shook her head, the tears streaming down her cheeks and splashing hot onto both of their hands. “But … but I couldn’t save you! Just like I couldn’t save my parents! You saved my life, and now you’re hurt, and they’re going to catch you … and maybe punish you, and it’s because of me!”

  Carlos moved his head in a negating gesture. The wonder was still in his eyes, along with the fear. “Don’t you see? You have already saved me, Señorita Julia. Whatever happens, it does not really matter. I will not go to my family, to my God, with blood on my hands. Besides …”

  A brief smile twisted at the pain lines around his mouth, and the bravery of it wrenched Julie’s heart. “… I will be all right. I will be a prisoner, but I will be alive, and perhaps when you are free, you may send to ransom me. They will not ask too much for one such as I. Now, you must go quickly. No, do not forget your bag. You may need it. Hurry, before it is too late! This is my last ammunition clip.”

  Another rustle sounded in the elephant ears, this one closer, and Carlos fired off another burst of the AK-47. An answering burst came from somewhere on the other side of the forked branches. None of the shots came anywhere close, and as soon as they stopped, Julie obeyed Carlos’s urgent gesture and got reluctantly to her feet. At least this way he would get medical attention. Snatching up her knapsack, she sprinted across the open V. As she scrambled over the other branch of the tree fork, Carlos let loose another burst, this one shorter. Then she heard behind her the audible click of an empty gun.