The DMZ Read online

From one of the pockets on his ammo vest, Rick pulled out a long oblong that Julie recognized as a popular Colombian candy bar. Tearing it open, he handed it to her. It was a sticky white nougat studded with nuts, not one of Julie’s favorites. But as she sank her teeth into it, its rather cloying sweetness was like the finest nectar melting down her throat. She almost whimpered with the pleasure of it. Rick watched her closely as she swallowed, then nodded approval.

  “Good, you’ve got some color back in those lips. Do you think you can go on? I hate to push you, but we need to get as far from this point as we can before night. I …” He frowned suddenly. “I’m still getting the feeling that someone might be watching us.”

  Julie nodded, her mouth too full to answer. The sugar racing through her veins had brought with it a new surge of energy, and though she knew it wouldn’t last long, she was also determined that Rick was not going to add holding him back to the other charges he had against her.

  He no longer pushed the pace. Once they stepped out of the mangroves, the trees grew high again overhead and the underbrush was scant, so they made good time. They encountered no more rivers, but several small streams crossed their paths, and Rick had them splash up the middle of each for a distance until Julie’s clean clothing was again wet to the knees and her feet felt as though they were beginning to rot within her shoes. The mosquitoes too were a plague now that Julie had the leisure to notice them, the salt of her perspiration a perfume that drew them in swarms until, in desperation, Julie yanked up the leaves of an aromatic plant that grew along the bank of one of the streams and rubbed its sticky sap over her hands and face.

  Rick swung around to watch this procedure. The legs of his fatigues were wet, but the heat of the jungle and his body had steam-dried the rest of his uniform except for patches of sweat where his ammo vest rubbed it. Resting his shoulders against a tree trunk in a rare gesture of relaxation, he tilted one corner of his firm mouth in amusement as Julie gave her cheeks a final rub.

  “Looks like army makeup,” he commented laconically. “Where did you learn that trick?”

  It was the first unnecessary conversation he had ever directed her way, and Julie glanced over at him uncertainly. Was he making fun of her? “From the I’paa Indians when I was a kid.”

  “Hmmm! Not a bad idea.” Leaning forward to pluck the bunch of crushed leaves from her fingers, Rick sniffed its pungent odor before applying it to his face and neck. He was as mud-spattered as Julie was, and the plant matter left green streaks intermingled with the grime. Julie had to repress a giggle at the banditlike appearance it gave him.

  Except for this diversion, Julie felt as though she were traversing the same piece of forest over and over. At least there was no further signs of pursuit or any human presence at all in this vast wilderness, and after an hour or so, Rick allowed the occasional rest period. But with each stop, Julie found it harder to push herself to her feet again when Rick announced it was time to move. By the time the jungle gloom darkened to twilight, she was moving in such a daze of exhaustion that an entire unit of guerrillas could have sneaked up on her without her noticing, and she hardly heard Rick when he glanced back to say, “You’re doing good. We’ll be stopping for the night as soon as we can find a safe place.”

  They had just splashed across another brook—this time Rick didn’t even bother to detour upstream—when they came across a dead hardwood. This one had been the victim of lightning, and the bulk of it had long since broken off. All that remained was a blackened, jagged shell about twenty feet high. Even this had crumbled away on one side, and the interior had been hollowed out by bugs and pecking bird life to leave a reasonably flat surface about five feet off the ground.

  Swinging himself up onto the stump, Rick kicked loose a profusion of toadstools before reaching a hand down to Julie. The lightning victim had been a big tree, and the area afforded by the hollowed-away stump was good sized, Julie discovered as she looked around—easily the size of her small apartment bedroom—and the remaining shell of the burned trunk offered an illusion of shelter.

  Rick gave the stump a critical examination. “I don’t like camping down on the ground—not without a fire, which we can’t risk right now. Too many predators coming out after dark. But at least it gives us a wall to guard our backs, and it’s as good as we’re going to get tonight.” He glanced over at Julie. “You want to wash up first, or shall I?”

  He accompanied Julie to the stream, checking the area all around and even the stream bed itself before striding back to the stump. Julie hurried to perform her toiletries. At one time this would have been because of embarrassment and the fear of being spied on. But weeks in a guerrilla camp under a constant barrage of eyes had done much to strip away self-consciousness and inhibitions, even if Enrique Martinez—or Rick Martini—up there had not proven his decency long before she’d known who he really was.

  She hurried instead because of the lengthening shadows and because she didn’t care to be alone in these woods even with Rick only a scream away. The bottom of the stream was a sludge that oozed up over her feet once she’d pulled off shoes and socks, but the water itself was clear enough that she risked drinking and deep enough for a thorough sponge bath as long as she was careful not to stir up the muck. She even washed her hair, then scrubbed the mud from both the clothes she’d been wearing and those stuffed into her knapsack, before changing into her last clean pair of khaki slacks and shirt.

  She was combing her curls out as she walked back to the stump, her wet laundry in a bundle over one shoulder and her knapsack over the other. It felt glorious to be clean again, and the cool water had washed away her exhaustion along with the mud. She felt wide awake again.

  Rick raised an eyebrow as he pulled her up onto the stump. He had removed his ammo vest, and on its spread-out leather back had dismantled his shattered hand radio. The pieces were laid out in a precise order that meant nothing to Julie. “I was just about to come looking for you.” He looked her over critically. “Looks like you put your time to good use.”

  Hardly a gallant compliment, but Julie chose to take it as such and returned his scrutiny just as frankly. The mud and grass marks streaking his stubble below the sweat-darkened tangle of his hair hardly gave him the look of a prepossessing character, and now that she was clean, she could smell the sharp tang of the perspiration that darkened his shirt where the ammo vest had rubbed. She wrinkled her nose at him and retorted satirically, “Yeah, well, looks like you could stand to do the same!”

  “Yeah, well,” Rick mimicked sardonically, but the straight line of his mouth curved as he ran a sharp eye over her shining cleanliness. “We didn’t all think to drag a week’s worth of laundry along.” He leaned forward to breathe in deeply. “Is that shampoo I smell?”

  Without a word, Julie dug into her knapsack and brought out soap, her small bottle of shampoo, toothpaste, and even a razor. It was a woman’s brand, but in these extremities, he’d better not complain. She added her towel, damp but still usable. Rick raised his eyebrows again, but took the articles with a brief, “Thanks.”

  He handed Julie the AK-47 before he swung himself down from the stump. “Pull that trigger and point if you have any trouble,” he told her as he slipped off the safety catch. “Just don’t point it in the direction of the creek. I have a fundamental objection to being shot with my own weapon.”

  “Very funny,” Julie retorted, but he was already gone. Julie spread her laundry and wet shoes out at the edge of the stump to dry and was eyeing the scattered pieces of the radio, trying to push down thoughts of a hot meal, when he returned. The pants of his fatigue uniform clung wet to his legs, though they had been scrubbed clean of mud. He had removed the shirt to wash it and himself, and his chest was bare except for her damp towel tossed over one shoulder.

  The mud and grass stains and stubble were gone from the lean planes from his face as well, and his hair was slicked back and neat. Julie realized again with a shock that Rick Martini was—or could be—a ve
ry presentable man if you went for the hard-boiled, military type. She averted her eyes from the play of muscle in his shoulders and back as he swung himself up onto the stump and walked over to spread his shirt and the towel to dry.

  “Thanks! I needed that,” he said briefly as he dropped the toilet articles into Julie’s open knapsack. He squatted down beside his scattered hand radio, and his face grew grim as he looked over the pieces, but he said only, “There isn’t much we can do with this tonight.”

  Scooping the pieces into the shattered casing, he dug another bar of nougat and a small bag of peanuts from the ammo vest. This time he split them evenly, passing half to Julie.

  “We’re going to have to take turns on watch,” he told Julie as they ate. “I’m not too concerned about the guerrillas right now. They’ll be bunking down for the night just as we are. But there’s plenty of nasties out there that like to hunt by dark, and I’d just as soon not offer them supper on a platter.” Julie could feel his eyes sharp on her in the growing gloom. “Are you up to it?”

  “Of course I am,” she said indignantly. “Actually, I feel really good.”

  Rick leaned back against the rotting shell of the stump, facing himself toward the unprotected edge of the stump, a defensive maneuver Julie was beginning to recognize. He laid the AK-47 across his lap, his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles.

  Already, even in the short time since they had bathed, the twilight had faded to evening, and Julie could make out only the outline of his strong profile as she slid back beside him to rest her head against the crumbling wood behind them. In a few minutes it would be pitch black under the jungle canopy. Julie finished her peanuts before asking quietly, “Rick?”

  “Hmmm?” His laconic grunt came from the darkness beside her.

  “If … if I promise not to slap you again, would you tell me what you’re doing here and … well, who you really are? How did you end up down here pretending to be a guerrilla? And what were you doing in that camp and … and with Comandante Aguilera?”

  He shifted positions as she finished her question, and Julie could see the ugly shape of the assault rifle as he moved it to a more comfortable position, and could hear the faint clink of something metallic as his foot brushed against the ammo vest. It seemed with the movement that it was the guerrilla Enrique Martinez, a dangerous and complex man dedicated to a deadly cause, who sat only too close in the darkness beside her, not Rick Martini, U.S. Special Forces, whom she’d known only a few hours and, in fact, did not really know at all. That he was not her guard but her savior, that this was not another guerrilla camp but freedom, seemed suddenly unreal, as though Rafael or Jaime might abruptly materialize out of the dark to take their turn on guard duty.

  “It’s just … you seemed so real—as Enrique, I mean. Even now, thinking back, I can’t believe it was all an act. All those things you said to Carlos and me—about the guerrillas and what you—they—believed. That what you’re doing is the best chance Colombia has to find peace. And all that stuff back in San Ignacio about the blood of the martyrs, and that Colombia will never have freedom until its people are willing to shed their blood fighting for it. You sounded like you really meant it, not like some kind of act to fool the guerrillas—or me.”

  “I did mean it,” Rick said flatly. “I wouldn’t have volunteered for this op if I didn’t believe that what I’m doing is the best chance—maybe even the only chance—to stop something really ugly from going down here. And I wouldn’t support the American presence in Colombia at all if I didn’t believe in our mission. The drug traffic we’re fighting here is doing as much to hurt the Colombians as it is the Americans, and we have a responsibility to do more than wall ourselves behind our borders and let countries like this take the fallout for a problem that has come about through the self-indulgence of our own citizens.”

  The ammo vest clinked again as Rick shifted his feet, and he leaned over to tug it out of range. “But I don’t believe that Americans—or any outsiders—are going to achieve any kind of lasting peace down here. I really believe, as I told you, that the only way Colombia is going to have any hope of lasting peace or freedom is for them to stand up together as a people—city-dwellers and campesinos, rich and poor—and fight for it! They can’t keep asking the United States or anyone else to bail them out or solve their problems. This country has forty million people. The guerrillas and the paramilitaries together are just a fraction of that … a few tens of thousands altogether. But those few thousands are going to keep grabbing them by the throat unless they are willing to make a stand against the violence, whichever direction it comes from. That may mean some bloodshed—even some serious fighting. But freedom has never been won without a willingness to shed your own blood—and not someone else’s.

  “That’s what the old saying means: ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’ Christianity grew because people like your parents were willing to lay down their lives for it. And those who do not care enough to bleed and die for what they hold dear will always be held hostage by those who do. Until the Colombian people learn that lesson, they will continue to lose far more people killed piecemeal than if they’d simply declared war once for all. Maybe that’s a simplistic way to look at things, but it’s how I feel. If there’s anything I admire about these guerrillas, it’s that they are willing to shed their blood for what they believe.”

  As might be said about him. It would seem that Rick Martini was as interesting and complex a man as Enrique Martinez, and Julie yearned for her micro-recorder. She was immediately ashamed.

  Are you really so frivolous that your career is still the first thing on your mind at a time like this? she demanded of herself bitterly and was suddenly angry with Rick for making her feel that way. Why should she feel guilty over making the choices most others would have made in her position?

  “So what were you doing on that plane?” she asked aloud. “It couldn’t have been just those dead environmentalists. You would have had to be in with the guerrillas long before that happened.” When he didn’t answer right away, she added impatiently, “Look, I’m not planning on running to CNN with all this. But I think by now I deserve to have some answers. At least whether all this was worth these …”—her voice caught—“these last weeks.”

  For a moment, Julie thought he still wasn’t going to answer. Then he stirred in the darkness beside her and said quietly, “I guess that’s fair. It isn’t anything that’s going to be secret much longer in any case—my cover is blown beyond repair, I’m afraid.”

  Julie winced, but there was no hint of accusation in his words, and when he went on, it was in the flat, measured tones of an intelligence briefing.

  “It all goes back several months now. I don’t know how much you follow the Colombian news. You may be aware we had a U.S. surveillance plane go down in these parts a few months ago.”

  Julie nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her in the dark and said aloud, “Yes, I knew that. It was in some of the research I did for this assignment.”

  “Then you know it was flying over the DMZ at the time. There was talk that the FARC had gotten lucky with a SAM—a surface-to-air missile. Only we knew better. The plane’s defenses were too good for that. A month later we lost our second asset in the zone. A Black Hawk SouthCom had just delivered to an army base right on the edge of the DMZ. We lost an American technician in that one. Did your research go that far?”

  Despite the dark, he evidently caught her nod. He continued right on. “Army intelligence has been kicking around for some time the idea of getting some HUMINT—human intelligence—assets into some of the bigger guerrilla groups out here. It didn’t go anywhere because intel on the guerrillas was proving easy enough to get. They’ve invited every reporter and activist group on the planet right into the zone. And the Colombians had their own contacts on the inside. We knew what was going on in there—or thought we did. The guerrillas weren’t at war with us anyway, so it didn’t se
em worth the potential political fallout of getting caught running a covert operation in a country that’s supposed to be a democratically of ours. Until we started losing American assets, that is.”

  A grim note entered Rick’s voice. “At best, we could be sure the FARC was in possession of some new and advanced weapon capacity that was a clear threat to both Colombian security and any further American assets in the zone. At worst … well, we had no idea what ‘worst’ could be. So …”

  Julie heard the quiet rise and fall of his chest before he finished. “They sent me in. I’d been a Special Forces instructor over at San José a couple years back so I knew the area. And I could pass as a native. My mother was Colombian, and since my father, who I assume was at least part Italian with a name like Martini, took off before I was old enough to remember, I grew up speaking Spanish at home. Not just any Spanish but with a Bogotá accent. Which made me a logical choice for the mission. The only risk was that someone might recognize me from my tour at San José. But the counter-narcotics troops don’t exactly associate with the guerrillas, and back then I had a regulation army butch cut.”

  Julie could hear the smile that crept into his voice. “Not even my own mother would recognize me right now, as I think you’ll agree. Anyway, it was a risk we chose to take.”

  He was leaving out a lot. Just who “we” happened to be. Precisely which agency had assigned him to this mission. Julie was too experienced a journalist to press for details he probably wouldn’t give. That he was an officer—a captain, he had said—with the 7th Special Operations Group out of Fort Bragg, said enough. Even a civilian like Julie had heard of the Green Berets and their reputation as one of the toughest and most highly trained units in the American military. That Rick Martini could indeed be a very dangerous man had not been her imagination. That he was also a dedicated one was becoming equally clear.

  “Colonel Thornton—you met him when you were at San José—was assigned as my controlling officer. We worked out a way for me to keep in contact. That radio and a secured voice-mail drop when I could get access to phone service. A Colombian contact got me in. Andy—not his real name—is a paid informant for Colombian intelligence as well as one of the senior officers in one of the FARC fronts. He recommended me to his brigade leader as a disgruntled member of one of the smaller guerrilla factions who had received military training from the Syrians and wanted to move where the action was. The communication between these different bands is poor enough that they had no way of disproving that story.