The DMZ Read online

  Juan swore helplessly. That was the injustice of it all! That he should have to choose. The truth was, he did not wish to ally himself with any of them. All he wanted was to be left alone in peace to work his land, battling nothing more than the elements and nature’s own bloody teeth and claws. Was that so much to ask?

  The peasant farmer calmed himself with several deep breaths. There was another option. To do what had been done to him and simply move the bodies elsewhere. Then, whether they were found or not, they would no longer be his concern.

  The vultures fluttered back down as he went for his mule.

  When Juan returned, the animal objected to the smelly burden being thrown across its back, but it was old and not easily spooked. Tying down the bodies, Juan shooed the vultures and led the mule down the path. He breathed easier as he crossed the boundary of the rancho.

  A snort from the mule was his first warning. Then he heard the quick beat of approaching horses. Abandoning the mule, Juan scrambled under cover of the underbrush that bordered the trail. A band of horsemen pounded around a curve just ahead. There were the expected exclamations as the horsemen discovered the mule. They stayed mounted as they made a half-hearted search through the brush for its owner.

  Juan did not move. Which authority they represented, he couldn’t guess. Military, FARC, vigilante squads—all wore the same uniform of battle fatigues and lethal-looking weapons.

  The peasant farmer didn’t emerge until several minutes after the horsemen had gathered up the mule’s reins and disappeared down the trail. Then he started home at a run. They were gone, but sooner or later they would take the time to discover the owner of their confiscated beast of burden. Then they would be back. And he could be sure the blame for the three deaths would end up on his own shoulders.

  An hour later, Juan Quintero paused on the verandah steps for a final survey of the little rancho that a generation of hard work and sacrifice and love had carved from inhospitable surroundings. The rising sun had burned off the coolness of dawn, but still the birds twittered their morning songs and the piglets made happy grunts under the mango trees. The vultures had dispersed, and the pastures lay lush and peaceful beyond the banana and coffee groves.

  Tearing his eyes away, Juan shouldered his pack and took his youngest by the hand. Then, nodding for the other children and Celia to fall in behind, he led them down the path from their home to join the sea of refugees set awash by Colombia’s civil war.

  TWO

  THIS OFFICE DIDN’T CARRY QUITE the clout of the oval one down the hall. Still, its occupant was accustomed to a certain deference, consideration, and above all, recognition of just how valuable his time was. James Whitfield, the president’s national security advisor, had zero tolerance for those who interrupted his busy schedule for trivialities.

  Even when those trivialities included the deaths of American citizens abroad.

  Slamming the stack of files down on the huge mahogany desk that was a measure of his importance to this establishment, he glared at the three visitors relaxing in leather chairs on the other side.

  “I have here another bomb blast in Jerusalem. A demand that we extend our security forces to stop the latest tribal conflict in southern Afghanistan. A fresh threat against our embassies in northern Africa. Pakistan and India are rattling nuclear sabers once more. China is playing war games again on the border of Siberia, only this time they’ve invited North Korea to play along.”

  With each statement, he’d picked up a file and dropped it with marked emphasis onto a new pile.

  “I’ve been in meetings all morning with three of those ambassadors, not to mention the UN Secretary-General, who like a typical woman figures it’s her job to single-handedly clean up the mess the world’s in. With the U.S. footing the bill, of course! I’ve got two more ambassadors on their way in right this minute, then I face a defense committee screaming over the sell-off of Russian military hardware to every Third World terrorist who can scrape up the bucks.

  “So maybe you’d like to tell me why I’m giving up the fifteen minutes I’ve managed to grab onto for lunch just because some idiot American tourists chose to disregard every embassy warning we’ve issued and get themselves killed by Colombian guerrillas? I do catch CNN. And read your intel briefings. Neither of which links the incident to imminent war. Or international upheaval. Or even so much as a policy shift with the Colombian government. In other words, not a single good reason this couldn’t have been filed on my desk with the rest of these reports!”

  Whitfield was as massive as his desk and of much the same rich hue, a giant of a man often assumed to be a former NFL player, though the closest he’d ever come was the Naval Academy football team. The ferocity of his scowl had made steel-tough Marines tremble in their size-twelve boots. But his three visitors evinced only mild interest in the bulging veins at his temples and other symptoms of rising blood pressure.

  Charles Wilson, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, exchanged a wry glance with his two companions before rejoining mildly, “We wouldn’t be wasting our own lunch hour if it wasn’t urgent, and you know it, Jim. So just take your mind off your turkey-on-rye for a few minutes and listen.”

  “What we need to discuss,” the man on Wilson’s right added quietly, “you won’t hear on CNN.” Martin Sawatsky, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a slight, unobtrusive man of medium height. He looked more like a law firm accountant than the head of the world’s most powerful intelligence network, and there were those who complained bitterly at how misleading that impression had been.

  “Those dead tourists who turned up yesterday—well, the fact is, they weren’t tourists. Nor were they—exactly—environmentalists, which was the ostensible reason for their presence down there. At least, not all of them. One of them was ours.”

  “What do you mean—ours? Yours?” Whitfield demanded. “Or yours?” His choleric gaze moved to the third man before him, General Brad Johnson of SouthCom, the American military’s Southern Command. Then on to Wilson, the drug czar. “Or yours? Are we talking spooks or Special Ops? And who knew about this? Let’s have some specifics here!”

  “Well—” Charles Wilson was drawling when General Johnson cut in abruptly. “What we’re seeing here is a pattern, Jim. That’s why I flew up from Miami as soon I got the news. This is the third incident in the last three months where we’ve lost American assets in Colombia. The problem is, we have no idea why. I think we may have a serious situation on our hands.”

  Whitfield’s gaze didn’t mellow. “What kind of a serious situation? Internal? External? Nuclear? And when? Today? Tomorrow? Next year?” he added pointedly, glancing at his watch. “And what does this have to do with your dead tourists, or environmentalists, or whoever they happen to be? One of whom turns out to be ‘ours.’”

  “Whoa!” The general raised a hand to stem the flow. “Look, Jim, it’ll be a whole lot easier if we can just brief you from the beginning,” he said firmly. Johnson was as small and wiry as Whitfield was massive, proof that bulk wasn’t the top criteria for the Marine Corps in which they both had served. But he had known the other man for too long to be overawed by his volume or size. “We’re going to need more than those fifteen minutes you allow yourself for lunch, though.”

  Whitfield glanced from one dead-serious expression to another. He hadn’t risen through the minefields of both military bureaucracy and politics without learning to smell trouble.

  Slapping his intercom switch, he bellowed, “Susan, tell the Pakistanis we’re bumping them to Friday. And don’t take any guff from Ambassador Oman about India getting preferred treatment.”

  He kicked back in his customized, reinforced armchair. “I’m all ears, Brad. Shoot.”

  “You know of course,” Johnson launched in, “that Southern Command is responsible for all American military activities south of the Mexican border. At the moment, between the counter-narcotics war and the escalating guerrilla situation, Colombia is ou
r main headache.” The general hesitated, faced with the dilemma of quickly summarizing an expert’s mountain of information. “I don’t know how extensively you’ve been briefed on the situation in Colombia.”

  “I know it’s tense,” Whitfield said bluntly. “I know they’ve got drugs and guerrillas—lots of both. From there you’d better figure on starting at the beginning.”

  “Good. For starters, Colombia doesn’t deserve the bad press it gets. Granted, they’ve always been a little rocky as far as internal stability. But on the whole, they’ve been one of our more stable and democratic allies in the hemisphere, clear back to Simon Bolívar himself. In fact, during the Pan-American boom in the sixties and seventies, they were one of the showpieces of the region. Per capita income climbing. The economy booming with dozens of new industries added to the traditional coffee and emeralds. Health and educational systems that were a model for a developing nation.”

  The general had fallen unconsciously into the pedantic tone of the political science instructor he’d once been at Quantico. He broke off with a slight smile. “You can read the encyclopedia as well as I can, Jim. Point is, the place was doing fine. Oh, sure, there were guerrillas. The Russians and Castro had been hawking their brand of Marxist revolution in Latin America for the last forty years, but in Colombia at least, the peasants said no. They had more to gain by homesteading land distributed by the agrarian reform or by simply sending their kids to school and working their way up the economic ladder as we Americans did a century back.

  “Then came the cocaine boom and the drug war.”

  “Something we can’t blame entirely on the Colombians,” Charles Wilson interjected as Johnson paused. There was fire in the drug czar’s eyes. “American money and the American propensity for self-destruction are what’s fueling this situation, and we’d better not forget it. That isn’t to downplay the viciousness of the Colombian drug cartels and the undeniable corruption narco-dollars have spread through every legal and political institution they have. That much easy money would tempt a saint, which none of us are.

  “But the Colombian people have fought a bloody—and losing—battle against the narco-traffickers. The narcos have targeted judges, journalists, government officials—anyone who takes a stand against them. We have to ask ourselves how many Americans would be willing to run for office or speak out against drug dealing if the reward was almost certain assassination—for one’s family as well as oneself more often than not.”

  Brad Johnson cut back in. “Then on top of the drug violence, we’ve got the civil war that’s ripping Colombia apart. On one side are the leftist guerrillas, who have grown in the last two decades from a few scattered bands skulking around the jungle to some twenty thousand members between the different factions. On the other side we’ve got the right-wing paramilitaries. They may claim to be simple self-defense units banded together to protect their farms and homes against the guerrillas. But they’ve massacred thousands of civilians whom they allege to be guerrilla sympathizers.

  “And then there’s the government forces, police and military, who haven’t been totally blameless either of spilling innocent blood. Granted, we’ve got to remember that the Colombian military and police forces have been badly hurt by the guerrillas, who have the advantage of being able to hit and run back into their jungle while the military are sitting ducks spread out across a hopelessly large territory. Because of this, the military have tended to look the other way for anyone who will whittle down the odds for them. At least the paramilitaries aren’t trying to blow them up or their country.”

  Wilson broke in again. “And fueling all the conflict is the drug trafficking. We no longer have any doubts that both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries are financing their operations and arms purchases with narco-dollars. Estimates are that the FARC alone pull in more than half a billion dollars a year between the drug traffic and their kidnapping for ransom and extortion. With that money, they’ve been buying up SAM missiles, grenade-launchers, and who knows what else, to the point where they’re now better armed than the Colombian army itself.”

  “In the meantime,” Brad Johnson put in, “the civilian population is caught in the middle. More than a million Colombians have been dislodged from their homes in the last few years. But since they’ve crossed no borders, they get little sympathy or aid from the international scene.”

  Martin Sawatsky had been listening quietly while the other two talked. The CIA director caught a certain glazed impatience in James Whitfield’s eyes and raised a hand to interrupt. “Let’s not wander off the subject here, men. However we may feel for these people, it isn’t really our business to resolve other countries’ internal problems. The issue here today is our own national security. And not just in relationship to the drugs pouring across our borders. The American government has long recognized the threat drug trafficking poses to our citizens and has spent a fortune down there fighting it. But Jim, it’s our contention”—he nodded toward his companions—“that the armed conflict in Colombia poses more of a threat than the cartels. If the guerrillas continue making their present inroads into Colombian territory as well as expanding their connections with the drug traffic, we may soon be looking at the first literal narco-republic. On top of that, we have reliable reports that the guerrillas are beginning to cross all of Colombia’s borders—into Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil. If this situation is left unchecked, we face the possibility of half of Latin America going up in flames. And this is no Kosovo, halfway around the world. It’s on our own back doorstep.”

  James Whitfield looked less than impressed. Despite his disclaimer of ignorance, he had yet to hear anything new, and only the rank of his visitors kept him from summarily dismissing the session as he’d done often enough with subordinates who were less than concise and to the point. He leaned forward abruptly with a force that crashed his front chair-legs onto the polished floor. “Hold on just one second. There’s no point in starving while we do this.”

  Slapping the intercom, he bellowed, “Susan, have the cafeteria send up sandwiches all around. And coffee. Lots of it. Black.”

  Swinging back to his guests, he grunted, “Okay, let’s get on with it. I don’t have all afternoon. There’s one thing you can explain to me. Just what is it these guerrillas want? I’d understood that most of those Marxist revolutionary movements down there had faded into the woodwork once the end of the Cold War dried up their outside support. Surely after what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe, these people can’t still believe the workers of the world want their brand of socialist paradise.”

  Sawatsky leaned forward to answer. “We don’t understand their motivation either,” the CIA director admitted. “That’s partly why we’re here today. Our own analysts predicted the Marxist movements would dry up in Colombia just as they have elsewhere. The guerrillas certainly can’t claim the support of the Colombian people. According to a recent poll down there, three-fourths of the Colombians feel that the guerrillas have no political ideology beyond drug trafficking and kidnapping. So why don’t they just give up? Lay down their arms, cash in their bank accounts, and settle down to live on the proceeds as leftist rebels have done from El Salvador all the way down to Chile?”

  James Whitfield had never appreciated being handed questions rather than answers. “Okay, I give up—why?” he said bluntly. “I’m assuming yours was a rhetorical question.”

  “That’s what we’d like to know,” General Johnson said. “At SouthCom, we’ve been watching this pot boiling higher for years, and we can’t help wondering if there isn’t something—or someone—more behind the continuing mayhem down there than the general cantankerousness of the guerrillas and paramilitaries.”

  “You mean, outside manipulation—like Castro sending Che Guevara into Bolivia?” Catching his visitors exchanging a glance of surprise, Whitfield added dryly, “I do catch an occasional movie outside my own field.”

  “Well, yes, that’s exactly what we suspect,” th
e general agreed. “We’ve been receiving reports for years of foreign terrorists working with Colombian rebel groups. Of course, the Cubans and Russians have been supplying military advisors and aid to leftist rebel groups all over the globe for decades. Che Guevara was one of theirs. But that aid dried up along with everything else in the Soviet Union, and as for Castro, he’s far too busy trying to keep his internal problems under control to be wasting money down south.

  “Still, we have intel on Chilean and Argentine Marxists down there as well as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso—the Shining Path movement. We know FARC members have received pilot and weapons training in Syria and Libya. Irish IRA operatives were caught down there not long ago, and members of both the Japanese Red Army and the Iranian Hezbollah have been seen among the guerrillas. Add to that confirmed contacts with al-Qaida as well as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and possibly the PLO, and it’s enough to make our people down there start getting antsy.”

  “We can’t rule out that these may be simply mercenaries,” Sawatsky cautioned. “A lot of terrorists were left out of a job when the Cold War ended. A lot more were scattered when al-Qaida operations were ended in Afghanistan. Some may simply be hiring out their services as consultants. The guerrillas certainly have the cash flow to do so these days. However, we must consider the possibility that these reports represent a concerted effort by outside interests to destabilize the zone.”

  A knock on the door heralded the sandwiches.

  “So why would any outside interest want to screw up Colombia?” James Whitfield mumbled around his turkey-on-rye. “The place is a mess. It isn’t strategically valuable territory to anyone but the Colombians. What would they have to gain?”