The DMZ Read online

  Half sliding down the muddy bank, Dr. Renken swung her briefcase into a dugout canoe. Two of the village men were already laying tall spears and bows and arrows in the bottom of the canoe. The others were pushing two more canoes into the water.

  Gesturing toward the hunters, Dr. Renken said earnestly, “Can’t you see it, John? If these guys really can take us back to where they saw the gringos—if we can actually catch them on film breaking the law—then we can break this case wide open. Think of the PR! Maybe even international TV. Once the whole world sees just how corrupt and underhanded the oil companies are, no court is going to rule for them, no matter how much government pressure they bring down on the locals.”

  John scrambled down the bank behind her, his arms flailing wildly as he skidded on a slick patch of clay. Grabbing instinctively to protect his camera case, he sat down abruptly in the mud. “That’s fine, but can’t we just think about this a little? For one thing, is there some reason we’re climbing into this canoe instead of taking the plane?”

  A stone’s throw upstream, the amphibious Cessna 206 that had flown them to the village was floating just offshore, its Colombian pilot lounging in the open door, watching them, his feet propped up on one of the wide floats. The photographer eyed the dugout canoes with disfavor. Their only visible propulsion was the long wooden paddles the hunters were now lifting out. “Let’s be practical here, Winnie. Eduardo can fly us out there. We’ll pinpoint the drill site. Then we call the authorities. No sweat!”

  “Right! Like we have a map with the coordinates marked on it! The hunters couldn’t even tell us whether it’s east or west—just ‘down that river’ and ‘around that bend’ and so on. That’s a lot of territory to be flying around blind, even if we could be sure the site is visible through the trees. No, the only way we’re going to find the place is to let these guys take us to where they saw the gringos. Besides, we can’t wait for the authorities. If the oil companies finish exploration before we get there or even catch a whiff that someone’s checking up on them, they’ll be out of there in a flash, and we’ll never be able to prove what they’re up to. We’ve got to catch them in the act.”

  The photographer put out a hand to stop Dr. Renken as she started to climb into the canoe. “Fine! But no point risking the two of us like this. You wait here with the plane while I go take the pictures.”

  With an incredulous laugh, she shook off his hand. “Just what century are you living in? This is my party, and I’m going! And so is Roberto. We’ll need him to talk to these guys. Roberto!”

  The interpreter was still picking his way down the bank, stepping carefully to avoid unnecessary mud on his vinyl dress shoes. He personally saw no reason to be chasing a hunter’s tale into the jungle, and had agreed to go only because the woman had threatened to stop his pay if he did not. If he needed any further proof these gringos were crazy—!

  Reluctantly, he quickened his steps as the hunters began to shove the last canoe offshore. Clambering over the gunwale, Dr. Renken glanced back at the photographer. “Of course, there’s no reason you can’t stay with Eduardo,” she remarked sarcastically. “As long as I take the camcorder with me.”

  “Not on your life!” The photographer waited only for Roberto to crawl into the second canoe before clambering into the third one himself. “C-PAP would have my head if I let you off alone,” he called out to Dr. Renken, “no matter what century this is. No—you go, I go. Though I still think it’s the dumbest thing this job has landed me in yet.”

  “Your choice,” she answered indifferently. Already the lid of her briefcase was open and Dr. Renken was powering up the laptop. “As for the plane, Eduardo can wait here until we get back. I’ll just modem headquarters and tell them we’re going to be a few hours late. I mean, how far can this place be? They said it was within their hunting territory.”

  Hours later she was still asking the same question. The flotilla of canoes had long since turned off the river that flowed past the village into a smaller tributary. Since then, they’d made so many turns and crossed so many intersecting waterways that their passengers couldn’t guess in which direction the village lay. The stream they were presently floating down was wide and shallow between high banks.

  Dr. Renken shuddered as they passed a beach on which a dozen caimans, the Amazonic version of the alligator, lay sunning. Above them on the bank, she spotted the first human habitation they’d seen since leaving the village—a cluster of thatched huts nestled beneath the jungle canopy. Down on the beach, a barricade of stakes walled off a half-dozen canoes from the sleeping reptiles.

  The paddlers didn’t slow as they approached the village. Instead they picked up their stroke, casting uneasy glances at the village as they slid past. The three canoes stayed close to each other. The village itself was remarkably quiet, without a sound or movement, as though everyone had gone into hiding as soon as the flotilla of canoes had approached.

  “Tribal enemies?” Dr. Renken wondered aloud.

  In the other canoe, John only shrugged. He had grown increasingly silent and morose as the hours passed, his narrowed eyes concentrating intently on the wall of jungle on either side.

  The paddlers showed no effects of their strenuous activity under a blazing sun on the open river, their naked bronze backs bending rhythmically hour after hour in long, powerful strokes. Roberto, meanwhile, had been forced by the heat to abandon coat and tie.

  Over her shoulder, Dr. Renken addressed her interpreter. “Roberto, find out how much farther this is going to be. I really don’t care to spend the night out here.”

  Roberto complied sullenly. The front paddler in his canoe turned his head at Roberto’s sharp interrogative. His terse two-word response had been repeated often enough by now to need no translation: “Not far.”

  This time, though, there seemed to be some truth in the assurance. Just a few hundred meters past the village, the paddlers eased the canoes into a narrow, deep channel. A kilometer later, the channel emptied into a wide, algae-choked slough. The hunters paddled toward shore, where another complication arose.

  “What?” Dr. Renken demanded, after only she, John, and Roberto stepped out of the canoes. “What do you mean, they won’t come with us?”

  “They say that if you go that way”—Roberto gestured up the bank where some of the tallest hardwoods they had yet seen soared to form a thick canopy high overhead—“you will come to where they saw the foreigners. But they will not go beyond this laguna. They would not have come this far if the Wise One had not ordered them to guide you. They say the white riowa are not truly men at all but ghosts. White ghosts who will destroy anyone who enters their territory.”

  “Well, more proof that it’s the oil companies!” Dr. Renken snorted. “Come on, Roberto, that’s the oldest trick in the book! Scare off the natives by making them think the area’s haunted. Stay away, or the ghosts will get you!”

  “It is no tale.” Roberto glanced nervously toward the lengthening shadows along the bank. “The village we passed—they say it is empty because the ghosts snatched the people away. And two of their own party disappeared when they were last here.”

  “Maybe we should reconsider this,” John started, but Dr. Renken cut him off. “Not you too, John! So the villagers didn’t like the invasion and decided to clear out. Or took a job at the drill site.”

  The stolid expression of the hunters made it clear nothing would change their minds.

  “Fine, then, they can stay here with the canoe. We’ll go take our pictures. When we get back, I’m calling in Eduardo. He’ll have to find us here and pick us up. There’s no way we’ll be back now by dark. No, not you, Roberto!” she added sharply as the interpreter started to climb back into the canoe. “We might need you.”

  “But I know nothing of the jungle,” Roberto protested. “I have lived always in the city. This is foolishness. Without a guide, we will all be lost out there.”

  “Oh, no, we won’t. John, you did bring the GPS, didn’t
you?”

  The GPS unit John pulled from his camera bag was the latest Motorola sports edition, little larger than a cell phone. Calling up their present coordinates on the tiny screen, the photographer keyed in the direction the hunters had indicated. Shouldering his camera bag, he reached for Dr. Renken’s briefcase.

  “Oh, just leave that here,” she told him. “They say it’s not much farther, and I don’t want to be dragging that through the jungle. We won’t need it until we call in the plane.” She saw one of the hunters eyeing the black vinyl case. “Before we leave,” she told Roberto, “just make sure these guys understand they’re dead if they touch that.”

  Roberto gave the warning, then shed the rest of his dress clothes and fashioned a loincloth from a length of cotton he found in the canoe, making him look remarkably like his jungle relations.

  As they stepped away from the canoes, the forest canopy closed around them, the tall, straight columns of hardwood and the canopy’s green ceiling so unvarying that without the GPS the three would have been lost almost immediately. But passage underfoot was easy, since the thick canopy cast a perpetual gloom on the forest floor that inhibited undergrowth.

  Dr. Renken took the lead, the photographer quietly calling occasional corrections when she strayed from the course marked out on the GPS. Roberto brought up the rear, looking incongruous and unhappy with his makeshift loincloth and the dress shoes he’d kept on. Whatever the outward similarities, his city-bred feet lacked the leathery hide that allowed his jungle cousins to roam barefoot over stones and thistles.

  Predictably, the trek was much longer than their native guides had indicated.

  “At this rate, it’s going to be too dark to film!” Dr. Renken fumed, slapping a dangling vine out of her face.

  But several more strides brought a satisfied smile. “Well, well! Would you look at that!”

  “It’s a road!” Roberto exclaimed. “But out here—how can it be?”

  “The oil companies!” Dr. Renken informed him. “Big bucks! Concrete, too. I can’t imagine how they got that kind of equipment out here. And look how wide it is. What are they planning—a superhighway?”

  She strode out of the cover of the trees and down the shallow bank. John grabbed her arm before she reached the concrete. “Are you nuts? You’re hoping to blow the whistle on these guys, and you want to march right through their front door? You’re the boss, Winnie. But don’t you think it’d be a little more discreet to stay out of sight?”

  Shooing the other two back into the jungle, John took the lead, steering them through the huge trees with silent purpose and speed on a zigzag course that nevertheless kept them parallel to the concrete road. With surprise, Dr. Renken admired his quick and soundless movements.

  “Hey, John,” she called. “Where did you learn—”

  The photographer stopped so fast she stepped on his heels. Spinning around, he grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Look,” he whispered furiously, “maybe you think this is some stroll in the park, but it isn’t! It’s stupid and dangerous. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to get in there, get your pictures, and get out—without being seen or heard. If you would please just shut up!”

  Dr. Renken’s mouth dropped open in shock, then clamped shut. Subdued, she obeyed. Only a few paces later, John waved them to a stop.

  “A surveillance camera!” he pointed out grimly. “These people don’t want visitors.”

  His eyes narrowed as he scanned the quiet woods around them. “I have a funny feeling about this. Maybe we should just turn around right now …”

  “Not without my pictures.” Dr. Renken was already striding forward, ignoring the camera. “There’s the drill site!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “And—what do you know! There’s our missing Indians. So much for ghosts! They’re working for the oil companies—the lowlifes! Come on, John, get this on film.”

  She broke off suddenly as the photographer reached her side, Roberto trailing reluctantly behind. “Oh my! John—is that what I think it is?”

  For a long moment, no one moved or spoke. Then the photographer, his hands reaching for his camera bag, put it into words. “This is no drill site!”

  Dr. Renken edged backward as dawning fear overtook her stupefaction. “John, we’ve got to get out of here!”

  His agreement never came. Dr. Renken felt the sting on the side of her neck even as she saw the camcorder tumble from her companion’s hands. It might have been a particularly aggressive mosquito or even a wasp. But already, as the tiny dart came away in her hand, she could feel its effects racing through her veins, seizing her vocal chords so she couldn’t scream, turning her limbs to heavy wooden things that wouldn’t hold her up.

  Through the deepening twilight—or was it a fog?—a voice rose in the demanding upswing of an interrogative. But the words were garbled and unintelligible, like a cassette tape playing too fast. When hard hands lifted her from the ground, she could sense them only dimly, hardly able any longer to see or feel.

  * * *

  Juan Quintero was standing on the verandah when he saw the vultures wheeling black against the sunrise. There were too many for them to be scouting for their morning feed. No, death had come to his rancho during the night, and he could not hope that it would be only a wild animal or even one of the rancho’s more elderly dogs or cats. His luck had been too devastating for that.

  “Celia!” The roar brought his wife scurrying from inside the house. Worry clouded her eyes as they looked up at the birds circling purposefully above the eastern horizon. There was no need for words. Shoving his coffee and half-eaten arepa into her hands, Juan left the verandah at a run.

  The dawn breeze was sweet-smelling and still cool as he hurried down the path. Songbirds and small creatures chittered softly in the tall grasses. A litter of piglets nesting under the mango trees added their own domestic chorus to the morning. It was a beautiful land—his rancho. A good land.

  Juan’s father had brought his family here in the seventies, when Colombia’s agrarian reform was still offering free land to any peasant courageous and hungry enough to brave the jungle and its dangers. Over the years, the Quintero family had battled the wild beasts and the heat and the mosquitoes and all the plagues that came with them. Malaria. Typhoid. Yellow fever. As with every homesteading family, the burial ground had seemed to grow faster than the cleared fields.

  But now Juan had two hundred hectares that he could call his own. Banana and plantain groves edged the path along which he was now hurrying. Beyond were rice fields, a patch of yucca, coffee bushes heavy with ripe fruit. His cinder block home was small, but it was neatly whitewashed and tight against the monsoons, its tile-roofed verandah wide and shady for hanging the hammocks during the heat of midday.

  Yes, it was a good life they had carved from the jungle.

  But today there were other enemies than nature to threaten the hard-earned peace of his home. The guerrillas, who labeled as “capitalists” and “oppressors” the men like himself who had paid in sweat and blood for their land. The paramilitaries, self-styled defense squads who claimed to protect the common people against the guerrillas but whose vigilante tactics were often more ruthless than the guerrillas’ own. And, no less, the military themselves, who had abandoned to fate the countrymen they were sworn to protect, while they remained behind the safety of their barricades and guard towers.

  As Juan left the path, the vultures became a squirming black cluster against the ground. His nostrils pinched shut at the stench of rotting flesh. What blow had an evil fate struck him this time? The mule? One of his remaining pigs? At least his children were safe in their hammocks.

  The scavenger birds rose in an angry flutter at his approach, and he saw that his premonition of ill had not been misplaced. The disturbed meal, however, was no animal. There were three of them, spread-eagled facedown in the soft clay of the bank. The vultures had made vicious tears in the clothing and flesh, but the limp and sprawling bodies were intact.
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  Or almost.

  Stripping twigs from a branch to make a pole, Juan used it to roll over the nearest body, this one almost naked in the loin wrap of the poorest peasant or jungle Indian. His stomach heaved at the bloody mess fire ants had made of the dead man’s face and chest. Who were these unfortunate souls? Rebels shot down and abandoned by soldiers on patrol? Suspected guerrilla sympathizers murdered by the paramilitaries? Or simply innocent citizens caught in the crossfire between them all? There were no bullet wounds that he could see. Nor any visible sign of what had caused their deaths.

  They had not died here—that was certain. All three were muddy, but not with the yellow clay of the stream bank. They were so muddy that the shorts and T-shirts of the other two hardly showed their original color, and their hair was matted and brown with murk as though the bodies had earlier been tossed face up on mucky ground.

  Then something new caught Juan’s eye, and the cold sweat of his nausea chilled further. The hair of these other two showed lighter roots underneath the filth. Much lighter. And the skin at the base of the neck, where neither sun nor the vultures had yet touched, was pale as a full moon.

  Rolling the two bodies over, Juan swallowed bile as he studied the remains of those ruined features. Even through the ravages of insects, there was no doubt. These two were foreigners. Worse, one was a woman.

  This would have to be reported; for people like this, someone was sure to come looking.

  But reported to whom?

  The military base that claimed authority over this zone was a full day’s travel by mule. The FARC commander was much closer, and his followers had made clear to the local farmers that anything unusual in the area must be reported to him. But if Juan obeyed, it would only earn the paramilitaries’ accusations that he was collaborating with the guerrillas. Whichever way he turned would bring the others down on him.