09-Twelve Mile Limit (40 page)

As she lowered herself into the tub, she said, “It would be better if we had a sweat hut. Then I could lay back while you poured water on the rocks for heat. The paje would come and give me the juice of murure bark to purify my blood, and the women would massage my body to loosen the creature inside me, and let it know that it is not wanted.

“If the creature still refused to leave, the paje, or another man of my choice could then enter me, and deposit his seed. In that way, the creature would be replaced by a child of my own wanting.”

I cleared my throat, uneasy with the direction the conversation was headed. “There’s some herbal tea in the kitchen. I can make tea for you, or get you something cold, with ice.”

The girl said she’d like something hot to drink, and some honey, too, if I could find it. Then she added, “When you come back, it will be necessary for you to rub my belly and make the creature move.”

I sat naked in the tub behind the girl, her head and hair comfortable on my shoulder, her eyes closed, no pain now showing on her face, as my fingers kneaded her stomach and abdomen, and then lower on her body, too, the tendoned areas between her thighs.

She’d shown me exactly what she wanted me to do. Insisted on the familiarity. “Beginning at my shoulders, first the front, then the back, you must gently stroke downward, pushing everything in my body toward the place where a woman is open to the earth. Over and over, you must do this.”

I massaged her for an hour. Longer, perhaps. There was no hint of sexuality between us, no escalating passion, despite what my hands were doing, the private place where my fingers touched.

She was sick, in trouble, in need of help. I felt a closeness to her, a very real intimacy, but no more.

Once, her eyes still closed, she reached beneath the water and encircled my penis with her hand. Holding me, she said, “If you wish, I can make you ready, and you may enter me. You have done much to help, and it would be good to replace the creature with your child.”

I kissed the top of her head. “No, Keesha. I’m flattered, but no.”

“Are you certain? In just this short time, your male part has told my hands that it would soon be ready.” She squeezed me for emphasis.

I lifted her hand away. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think the medicine worked?”

“Not yet, but it may.”

I pulled her body closer to mine. “Lay back. Try to sleep.”

When I awoke, the water had once again turned cool. Even so, Keesha didn’t want to get out.

She seemed in a sort of mild stupor, as if the drug she’d taken had made her slightly drunk. I got her out of the tub, rubbed her dry, then steered her into the bedroom, and tucked her in, naked, beneath the sheets.

I checked my watch: 3:15 P.M.

I dressed myself in the same clothes I’d been wearing, then went out the door of our suite, into the hallway of the main houses. My jungle boots echoed on the tile floors. There was no other sound. The place seemed deserted, silent as a crypt.

As I passed the dining room, I noticed that only two places were set: very fine-looking china and silver, and green cloth napkins. If Tyner was expecting to eat with me, why hadn’t they set a place for Keesha?

I continued walking but then stopped: a telephone. There was a black cordless telephone atop the drink trolley.

I stepped into the room, looked around—no one there—then took the phone, pleased to hear a dial tone. I still had Harrington’s number in my pocket, and I looked at it as I dialed. I heard two rings, and when a man’s voice answered, I said quickly, almost whispering, “Hal. It’s Doc. Our chopper was shot down, the crew’s dead, and I need a pickup ASAP. I need help.”

Then I listened to a man who was definitely not Hal Harrington reply, “We don’t need help, Commander. I thought I had you convinced. We can do it ourselves with just a small team. Small risk and big profit—stay where you are. I’ll take you to the war room and I’ll show you.”

A minute later, Curtis Tyner was standing there, grinning at me and wagging his finger—naughty, naughty for trying to call out—and he said, “Follow me. We’ll take a look at some topo maps and discuss our strategy. After that”—he paused, looking at me as if assessing my worthiness—“after that,” he continued slowly, “I think I’ll take you down into the armory—the Vault, I call it—and show you something. It’s something I’ve shown only to a couple of other white men. Ever. My collection. Not many would understand. I think you might. It’s quite a thing to see.”

“You collect weaponry?” I asked, feeling oddly uneasy, not certain I wanted an answer or to see what it was that Tyner collected.

“Oh, of course. Lots and lots of weaponry from all over the world. Fighting. It’s my business, understand. One of my businesses, anyway. But I have other things, too. Unusual things that you may appreciate.”

As we walked, Tyner told me, “To kill one of those jungle girls, you’d have to cut her heart out and put it in the freezer. Leave it there for at least an hour. The men aren’t so bad. A mild case of the flu will do them in. But you can’t hurt those Indio women. They’re savages.”

I’d told him about Keesha’s condition and asked about getting her some medical attention. Where were the closest facilities?

I should have known what his response would be. Tyner had already made it clear that he considered the rain forest his enemy. As an enemy, he’d done an effective job of redefining it as inconsequential, and so also dehumanized the society which the forest had created.

“Commander, if you want a girl, we’ll fly to Cali. You can pick out seven—any age you want—and bring them back here. One for every day of the week. The best thing you can do for the Indian girl is let her go back to her tribe.”

It was a second negative reaction to a second request. The first had been no less reasonable, I thought: Why not contact my friends at the U.S. Embassy and at least tell them what we had planned? If we failed, who was there to back us up? I explained to him, “The people involved are very important to me. We need a second team. Just in case.”

It infuriated me that he wouldn’t even consider it, and I found his reasons revolting, though I couldn’t let him know how I felt. So I listened stoically, as he said, “If we get the governments involved, the U.S. government, Colombian government—it doesn’t matter. There are going to be rules. Heads counted, reports filed. Don’t you understand? That’s why they hire people like me to come here in the first place. I provide a necessary service.

“The bad guys don’t play by the rules, so the government types need a buffer. Someone to keep civilized people from getting strangled by their own stupid laws. Hell, Commander, they don’t want to know what I do, just so long as I get it done. Lying to them is part of the deal. They expect it.”

A few minutes later, he tried to reinforce his point. “The team we’re taking is the best that money can buy, so money is the key word here. My men, that’s all I care about. I trained them myself. They’re like my own children. If we ask your pals to join us, we’re not asking for military backup. We’re inviting witnesses.”

Tyner’s study consisted of a single upper-story room, with a massive wall of glass so thick that I knew it had to be bulletproof. It looked out onto the same horizon of rain forest as from the suite in which Keesha now slept, but from an elevated aspect.

The walls were lined with books, decorated with coats of arms and medieval weaponry. There was a giant-screen television and several computers.

“I built the cellular tower so I can have Internet access,” he told me. “A couple of the guys out here have it, guys who do what I do.” He chuckled. “Not as well, of course. But they’ve had the same mini-towers built. We stay in touch, send instant messages—I’ve got a bunch of e-mail friends back in the States who believe I teach high school in Iowa. Davenport—grew up there, love the place. Mostly, though, my colleagues and I trade intelligence. Kind of our own profit-sharing plan.”

Which was how, he said, that he happened to have a low-altitude aerial photograph of the compound where, hopefully, Amelia, Janet, and the others were being held.

Davenport—I remembered receiving an order from a high school there. It now seemed a decade ago.

He sat at the computer, and I stared over his shoulder, as he said, “The photo’s a couple years old, but the place can’t have changed that much. It’s an old rubber plantation estate. French people owned it for years, then the drug people bought them out.”

I was looking at the roof of what seemed to be a very large hacienda, built around a courtyard and fountain, the entire estate enclosed by a high stone wall.

Tyner continued, “When the drug cartel went out of business, a corporation based in Saudi Arabia bought the place. They still do the raw rubber thing, plus they raise bees. My sources tell me they keep a fairly good-sized security team there—that’s not unusual for private businesses out in the jungle, by the way. Hired guns are cheap, and that’s what it takes to survive.

“So, yeah. It makes sense. The whole thing’s probably a screen for some kind of drug operation, plus they dabble in a little kidnapping on the side. Cash business. Saudi Arabians? That’s got terrorist cell written all over it.”

Tyner twisted the waxed ends of his mustache, studying the photo, and smiling. “I’m going to enjoy this one, Commander. These days, the turbans bring a pretty good price, plus they’re packrats when it comes to money. They keep a lot of cash on hand because the U.S. government has gotten very good at freezing their bank accounts. I ran ’em out of my area. They despise me. You know why?”

I said, “I could guess at a number of reasons.”

“But you’d never get it. The reason they despise me is, when I go after one of them, two of them—a dozen, it doesn’t matter—I have my men rub bacon grease on their rounds.”

“Why? Infection?”

“Their religion, Commander. For a devout Islamic, pig meat is considered unholy, an abomination before God. Put pig grease in them, you not only kill the body, you condemn their soul to hell. They don’t like that.

“Something else? Couple years back, some bigshot turban fundamentalist tried to start an organization in my territory. He and his group were from a Colombian city called Maicao. Cocaine, I believe it was. We used the greased rounds on his men, but we did something special with the bigshot. Every little farmer in the jungle keeps a couple of feral hogs. A wild pig’ll eat anything dead, and most things alive if it’s been wounded. The turban had already been shot in the thigh, had his leg broken. So my guys put a couple of more rounds in his knees, and flipped him into the pen.”

His smile broadened. “Psy-War-Ops. Something like that, word gets around fast. Most of the turbans in this country, the fanatics, they live in Maicao. In that town, anyway, they know my name and my territory. People like that, they stay away from someone like me because they understand me. So this is a rare one for me. This one’s got the smell of money. Yes, sir, outstanding!”

Tyner told me we would leave for Remanso by helicopter at 1 A.M. That way, he said, I could get some sleep, make sure I was rested.

“Down south, they’re still farmer-types, so you don’t want to attack too close to dawn, but they also like to stay up drinking aguadiente, so you don’t want to attack too close to midnight, either. This whole country, it’s a balancing act.”

He’d sent his men ahead in a tight convoy consisting of two Humvees and an armored personnel carrier. We’d be in radio contact, but he’d already briefed them on the plan of attack.

A helicopter? Humvees and armored cars? I looked at the hundreds of books on the office shelves, at the careful crafting of the wood, at the expensive, imported furniture, his executive’s desk, at the carvings and sculpture and the thick Persian carpet before I said, “Did you really get this rich killing people?”

I could see that the question irked him. Like many small, driven men, Tyner had small, nervous mannerisms. One was twisting the tips of his handlebar mustache. Another was an unconscious motion as if he were washing his hands over and over—a Freudian mannerism that could have meant something, or could have meant nothing.

“You sound as if you disapprove. Hah! Coming from you—of all people—that’s almost funny.”

I said, “I’m not making judgments, Sergeant. I’m just curious.”

“In that case, I’ll answer your question. Come here and take a look at this map of Colombia. See the middle section highlighted in red? It’s the size of a large state. The idiots in the government here gave all that land to FARC, the guerrillas. That’s like siege victims throwing ransom over the walls.

“FARC’s region, it’s got everything: timber, minerals, good farmland, and a potential for oil. If the bastards were smart, had some initiative, they’d have their own thriving little country going by now.”

Tyner turned to look at me, still irritated. “But they aren’t smart. And they’re lazy. Instead of working, getting rich, they keep asking for more, more. They don’t want political change, they want bribes. They want a free ride. See where I’m going with this, Commander?”

I said, “Sorry to be dense but, nope, not a clue.”

He returned his attention to the map and pointed to a section southeast of the FARC area. It was highlighted in blue, not as large, but still sizeable. “This,” he said, “is the territory I control. I’ve worked my ass off here for ten years, and every year the government gives me a little more for a very simple reason: I’m better at doing the things they don’t have the stomach or the brains to do. I make them look good. And I make it safer. That’s the main reason they don’t hassle me, and why I’m making lots of money.”

I said, “They pay you a bounty for the guerrillas you kill. I know that. But it can’t be that much. Not enough to run the operation you have here.”

He was smiling, proud of himself, once again twisting the ends of his mustache as he answered, “See? You’re a smart man. Bounty-hunting, that’s small time. Quick cash, but no future. I realized that from the start. So I’m going to tell you the truth. I haven’t shared this with many others. What I’ve done is start several ancillary companies. As a group, I’ve incorporated nationally and international. A little thing called Backyard Enterprises. Can you figure out why?”