The DMZ Page 42

  It wasn’t so difficult once the surprise had worn off. Even Julie’s inexperienced eye had caught the trained grace of his walk and the expertise of his fighting skills that far outstripped seasoned guerrillas like Victor, and were certainly nothing like the under-equipped and poorly trained Colombian soldiers Julie had known in her childhood.

  He didn’t even look particularly Colombian, now that Julie knew he wasn’t. His hair, no longer styled ruthlessly back but a sweat-darkened tangle that had grown to shoulder length during their weeks in the jungle, and the mustache that edged the firm line of his upper lip were both somewhat lighter than her own curls. His skin was tanned rather than brown, and his eyes were lighter than her own coffee brown as well, and tinged with green in this light. She’d seen them blaze copper when he was angry.

  Though there were many Colombians as light-skinned, especially around Bogotá where many Europeans had settled, like Julie he could have been one of many ethnic backgrounds, and it had been his flawless Spanish with its unmistakable Colombian lilt and the stiff accent of his English that had made him so convincing to Julie—and, it would seem, to the guerrillas as well.

  “So, who are you?” she asked quietly as his glance dropped from the fork overhead to her face. “What were you doing in that camp—and on that plane? And why are you pretending to be a guerrilla?”

  A puzzle piece she’d not yet had time to consider fell into place, and she added, “You’re the spy they’ve been looking for, aren’t you? The one they thought was with the UN mission.”

  Rick rose to peer out the opening in the trunk. “I guess there’s no point in denying that now. The guerrillas were tipped off—and I’m going to find out how when we get out of here—that the Americans were sending someone in besides the official team to investigate the deaths of our citizens. What they didn’t know was that I was already in on the ground—part of an operation to find out just what the guerrillas were up to here in the DMZ. I’d spent months working my way close to the leadership of this area’s FARC front when this whole environmentalist thing blew up. When Aguilera started agitating about a spy, I was afraid my cover was blown until I found out they were concentrating on the UN mission. No problem. You’d all be here and gone in a day, and I could get back to work.”

  His jaw tightened as he pulled his head back inside to glance over at Julie. “It was bad enough when Aguilera chose to parade me on international television where anyone in my unit or even some of the Colombians I’ve trained might recognize me and wonder what a Special Forces training officer is doing hobnobbing with the local FARC big wheels. I never dreamed anyone would be dumb enough to sneak out of that airport and give the guerrillas reason to believe that their reports of American spies were true. I should have known better with a plane full of reporters.”

  His last statement was as flat and expressionless as the others, but it flicked Julie on the raw, and she flinched. No wonder he’d been so furious with her! How much damage had her impulsive excursion—and Tim’s—done to this man’s carefully set-up operation?

  “But then who is Tim McAdams? I was sure—I thought he was a spy.”

  “I don’t know anything about the man,” Rick said flatly, striding back across the hollow trunk to lower himself to the floor beside Julie. “For all I know, maybe there really was an intel agent on that plane. It wouldn’t be the first time another agency screwed up an op by not letting us know what they had going down. I will say I wondered myself if either—or both—of you were intel. But it didn’t take long to figure out that you at least were who you said you were. No real agent would have ever come up with that story!

  “As for McAdams, if he’s one of ours, his cover is way overdone. We checked his story—the FARC, I mean—and it’s all there right out on the Internet. He’s been in Colombia several times over the last couple years to cover religious stories. And he has articles in Christian publications to prove it. He’s been written up in plenty of other parts of the world as well.”

  “Then he was telling the truth! He really is a missionary journalist. But—” Julie shook her head, bewildered. “If you knew Tim and I were who we said we were, how could you have just left us there? I mean, you weren’t a prisoner like we were. There must have been something you could have done to free us. At the least you could have gotten word out to someone that we were there!”

  A hot, painful pressure was building up in Julie’s chest. The weeks of captivity. The sleepless nights. The humiliation and boredom. Uncle Norm. Carlos. It had all been hard enough to endure. But now to find out that it was unnecessary?

  “You let them keep me a prisoner cooped up in that horrible little hut, thinking all the time I was never going to get free. You let my friends and … and family think I was dead. You let me believe I was about to be murdered when all that time you could have gotten us out—and didn’t! Why? Why would you do that?”

  Rick glanced across at her, his long lashes coming down to shade his eyes. “Sure, I could have—and blown my cover and the entire operation,” he said evenly. “You weren’t in any immediate danger. I’m sorry, but there was simply a whole lot more at stake here than the comfort—or the feelings—of a couple of civilians whose foolish actions got them into this situation in the first place.”

  Julie had seen it in many an old-fashioned movie, read it in books. But she’d never understood the impulse that could lead an otherwise mature adult to such behavior. It had always seemed so … so corny. But as she stared at him in disbelief, all the long weeks of fighting down fear and worry and despair, the terror and desperation of these last frantic hours of running and hiding, the horror of Carlos’s death—the images of which were still stark in her mind—all this welled up in a white-hot eruption of hurt and anger. Without any seeming volition of her own, her hand flew up.

  It was a hard blow, the flat plane of his cheek solid against her open palm, the smack of her slap a loud crack in the hollow interior of the tree. As suddenly as her fury had risen, it drained away to be replaced by shame. Julie stared with horror at the bright red imprint of her fingers on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “I … I can’t believe I did that.”

  Rick rose to his feet, his mouth a straight grim line. “I guess I deserved that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to call in your ride so I can get back to that mission.”

  He pulled the two-way radio from his belt. As he turned it over, Julie overcame her embarrassment to ask diffidently, “But won’t that just call in the guerrillas?”

  Rick opened a panel on the back of the radio. “There are a few things in this unit that aren’t quite standard guerrilla issue. Chiefly, a radio signal on a very secure channel that should be bouncing these GPS coordinates right now to our communications unit over on San José. If I change this setting, the signal will upgrade to my lifeline—a last-ditch distress call I’d hoped not to use. Unless Colonel Thornton has totally fallen down on the job over there, they should have a chopper scrambled over here within the hour to lift you out.”

  “Me? But—what about you? You can’t be thinking of going back there!” Julie demanded incredulously. “Won’t the guerrillas shoot you too for helping me?”

  Rick shrugged as he did something in the interior of the radio. “Not if I can talk Victor into buying why I’ve been out of contact this long. He’ll assume I’ve been looking for you, and if I can get him to believe I had radio problems—anyway, that’s a chance I’ll have to take. I’ve still got a mission to do.”

  He shut the back of the radio. “All this dead wood may weaken the signal. I’m going to set this outside. Stay here!”

  With that curt order, he ducked through the jagged hole of the opening. He had barely disappeared when Julie heard the blast of gunfire. She scrambled to her feet. “Rick!”

  He was already diving back inside, landing at her feet in a slide that would have done credit to a major league base runner. As he rolled over and onto his feet, Julie saw a
small bleeding slash along his cheekbone. Otherwise he seemed unhurt.

  The radio in his hand was another story. A bullet had struck it square in the middle, shattering the casing. Shoving the broken radio back on his belt, Rick snatched the AK-47 from his shoulder, thrust its barrel out the opening, and let loose a spray of gunfire.

  “Well, that’s done it,” he said grimly as he pulled his head back inside. “They now know I’m not one of theirs. And so much for calling in the cavalry. The radio’s busted.” He glanced upward, and Julie followed his eyes to the cool green light filtering through the cavity in the tree fork overhead. “That’s our only way out. Can you get up there?”

  Julie was climbing before he finished. The rotting wood had been eaten away deeply by insects, so there were plenty of holds for her groping hands. Once a chunk broke away under her fingers so that she almost lost her grip, but she caught at another hold and made it the rest of the way in an unbroken scramble fueled by new fear and desperation. Would this never end? They’d disposed of the tracking device. How had the guerrillas found them again?

  Below her, Rick fired another long burst, then climbed after her. He caught up as Julie pulled herself through the jagged opening. The fork where the two trunks joined would have been the size of a small table if it weren’t for the hole in its center, and it was almost as flat, giving ample room for Rick and Julie to pull themselves upright. Rick didn’t pause for a moment. Setting his foot on the next branch, he snapped back to Julie, “Hurry!”

  Julie scrambled upward behind him. Though the intertwined crowns of the two trees were dead, they were a hanging garden of leafy vines and gourds and moss that offered an abundance of hand holds while providing the climbers with an effective screen to hide them from the forest floor below.

  Ten feet. Twenty.

  Julie slipped on a patch of moss, and a steel grip on her wrist yanked her up to the next branch.

  Thirty.

  Resolutely, Julie set her eyes only on the next step, resisting the temptation to glance down through the tangle of vines to where the ground lay more than fifty feet below. The branches were thinning out, but the limbs were still plenty thick enough to hold their weight, and while these Siamese mahoganies were considerably stunted in growth, Rick and Julie were level with the lowest branches of the other trees. Their crowns, interwoven by connecting vines and hanging curtains of moss and orchids spilling down tree trunks and over branches, stretched away in a tangled maze as far as Julie dared lift her eyes to see.

  This was the jungle canopy, the playground of monkeys and sloths, where they spent a lifetime leaping from tree to tree and vine to vine without ever touching the ground. Reaching down to pull Julie onto a branch beside him, Rick gestured down its length to where it disappeared into the broad leaves of a neighboring tree, this one dripping with bulbous brown gourds.

  “Can you make it over there on your own?” he demanded tensely. When Julie hesitated, he added sharply, “If you can’t, say so now!”

  Julie had heard it too—harsh shouts reverberating inside the hollow trunk below them. She identified Linda’s angry call: “They are not inside. They have vanished into the air.”

  Snatching her wrist from Rick’s grip, Julie hissed, “Of course I can make it. I grew up in these jungles, remember? I’ve climbed these trees before. You just do what you have to. I can take care of myself.”

  Grabbing for a vine, she wrapped it tight around her fingers and began to inch her way forward, her knuckles growing white with her grip as she felt the branch sway under her feet. Glancing back, she saw Rick take a grenade from his belt. Her eyes widened as she realized what he had in mind, and even as he pulled the pin and tossed the grenade down toward the cavity through which they had climbed, she increased her pace, reaching for one vine after another at reckless speed.

  Rick caught up with her as she pulled herself onto a branch that belonged to the next tree. He had just stepped up after her when the grenade detonated. The rotted trunk did not so much explode as implode, tumbling in on itself with a thunder that rivaled the grenade itself. Julie clung to the branch, shutting her eyes as the tree they were now on swayed under the impact of the shock wave.

  “We have to go!” Rick’s whisper was as harsh as the furious shouts rising from below. Clamping a hand on her wrist, he hauled her to her feet. He placed a loop of vine in her hand, barely glancing back to make sure she was holding on before stepping to the next branch. Julie swallowed down vertigo as she pulled herself up after him. Higher and higher they climbed into the canopy even as they worked their way to the other side of the gourd tree. Rick, one step ahead of her, glanced back periodically to check on Julie’s progress, occasionally reaching a hand back to help her over the more hazardous spots.

  “Hurry!” he snapped as she hesitated before stepping across the gap to the next tree. Fury gave her the adrenaline to make the leap.

  “Did it ever occur to you I’ve been through a rather traumatic experience and could use some sympathy and consideration instead of … of … yelling at me all the time?” she hissed as he yanked her up to his side.

  His mouth set in a straight line as he glanced down at her. “When we’re on the ground, remind me to offer a shoulder to cry on. Right now I’m trying to keep us alive. And to think I was congratulating myself that you didn’t scream and cry and fall to pieces like nine-tenths of the female race I know!”

  Women! Julie could almost see the word hovering between his teeth as he swung himself to the next branch. Biting back her own retort, she scrambled after him. But he was right. They didn’t have the luxury for hysterics now.

  “Beast!” she said under her breath. Rick threw her a sharp glance over his shoulder, but if he’d heard, he didn’t comment, and as she lifted her chin and reached doggedly for another vine, he gave her a thumbs-up and an approving nod. Julie blinked and was infuriated with herself to find tears springing again to her eyes.

  The next interminable period was one more nightmare in a day full of them. Julie had been telling the truth when she’d said she’d climbed trees like these before. What she hadn’t said was how much she’d hated the experience. Where the I’paa children had scampered among their branches like monkeys, collecting gourds and pods, Julie had always been afraid she would fall, afraid she would lose her grip on the vines that, unlike Tarzan movies, tore loose only too easily in her hands, or that she would slip on the mossy limbs. Just the enormity of the drops made her dizzy every time she looked down, though they never seemed to bother the I’paa. It had been a relief when her mother had found out what she’d been up to and had forbidden her to climb again.

  Julie’s stomach stayed permanently in her throat as she pulled herself from branch to branch and inched out on limbs to spring over to the next tree. Wind whistled through the canopy, and more than once Julie found herself clinging helplessly to a branch, waiting for a gust to subside. Don’t look down, don’t look down.

  The guerrillas couldn’t possibly see their mad scramble through that tangle of vegetation below, and their occasional shouts were growing more distant. At some endless point later, Rick reached up to help Julie down onto the concave platform of another tree fork. For once he didn’t start immediately across but walked over to the edge. He looked down, listening. Then he swung around.

  “We’ve lost them. But that won’t last long. There’s got to be another bug on you—that’s the only explanation for how they’ve managed to follow us. And now that we’ve stopped moving, it won’t take them long to triangulate our exact position. We’ve got to find that bug—and fast.”

  He reached for her knapsack. “Is there anything else you were given in the camp besides those clothes?”

  “Just a few toilet things. But—why would they put two tracking devices on the same person? Couldn’t it be coincidence that they found us? Or …” Julie stopped as a thought struck her. “Are you sure they couldn’t have put a bug on you? Is there any way someone might have gotten suspicious tha
t you aren’t really a guerrilla?”

  “Of course not!” Rick answered impatiently. “Do you think I wouldn’t have known a long time ago if they’d had any suspicions I wasn’t who I claimed to be?” His hands stilled suddenly where they were exploring the canvas material of the knapsack. “At least—”

  He broke off to stare at her, and Julie, staring back, saw the same realization dawn in his eyes.

  “Oh no!” she breathed out. “Last night when I was talking to Tim, I told him we weren’t the only ones who fit the description of their spy—that there were guerrillas in the camp who’d been on the UN plane and in the airport—you and Carlos and Comandante Aguilera and Manuel Flores. I wasn’t serious, but if someone heard me … I’ve wondered all along if Comandante Aguilera knows more English than he lets on—or one of those guards of Tim’s.”

  “And I’m the latest recruit in that camp, and I speak fluent English—the obvious suspect. They couldn’t be certain—I’ve been too careful for that. But it might have been enough for them to lay a trap.” Rick already had his AK-47 off his shoulder and was running a searching hand over it, his mouth a straight grim line. “Not my clothes. I was wearing them last night. The radio never leaves my belt. But the gun. Or …” He shoved the assault rifle back on his shoulder with a frustrated shake of the head, and his hands went to his ammunition vest. “Or the ammo.”

  Rick popped the shells from one of his ammunition clips as though he were shucking peas. “Victor handed these to me when we moved out.” He made a small sound of combined annoyance and satisfaction. “There it is!”

  The device he held out was round, metallic, and no bigger than a battery for Julie’s watch. Dropping it to the surface of the tree hollow, Rick raised his boot, then paused. “No, if the signal stops, they’ll know we found it. We’ll leave it here—and see how they do climbing up here after it.”