Show No Fear Page 6

  “Oh, hell,” she’d breathed. “I thought we lost them yesterday.”

  “Evidently not. Our guys are busy working through the right channels to get them called off. Don’t worry.”

  He’d powered down his cell phone and stowed it in his left boot. Later, he’d given his watch with the compass to the innkeepers’ thirteen-year-old son. Lucy had felt a tug of pity for him. For a man used to relying on his gadgets, it couldn’t be easy to let the watch go.

  Other team members had left their belongings with the innkeepers for safekeeping, but Lucy clung tenaciously to her backpack, hopeful the FARC would let her keep a change of socks, her toothbrush, and her anti-malaria pills, at least.

  “This isn’t a camping trip,” Gus had reminded her.

  “Good. I hate camping.”

  Hours had passed since then. Lucy was considering the possibility that the FARC had stood them up when Gus looked up sharply.

  “Here they come,” he said, squinting up the road.

  She had to look twice. Dressed from head to toe in camouflage, the guerrillas remained virtually invisible against the backdrop of the jungle till they were less than a hundred meters away.

  “We should greet them,” suggested Fournier, urging the team to step out into the middle of the street. “Come. Show them your hands,” he urged, “palms facing out.”

  There they stood, growing soaked by the cold, steady drizzle, as rebels bristling with AK-47s, their chests crisscrossed with ammunition belts, trooped closer.

  We come in peace. Lucy sought to convey that message in her expression, while battling the impulse to assume a fighting stance. A cold sweat made her shiver in her wet clothing. Dread made her scalp tingle. It in no way lessened when she noted that six out of the ten rebels were mere teenagers. Teens were notoriously unpredictable. They didn’t think they could die, either.

  Two leaders, older and burlier than the rest, with insignia on their shoulders, detached themselves from the group to approach them.

  Fournier stepped forward and, in his accented Spanish, greeted the guerrillas with cautious courtesy.

  One by one, they were waved forward and introduced.

  Lucy suffered the scrutiny of two dark pairs of eyes, one cynical, the other hostile. The older man, a careworn-looking guerrilla whose beard was shot with silver, was Comandante Marquez. The younger man, Buitre—Buzzard in English—was introduced as his deputy.

  Bearing a scar that bisected his left cheek, Deputy Buitre struck Lucy as a dangerous entity. The crude, demoralizing look in his eyes brought back memories of another set of eyes that haunted her dreams. Dislike strangled her words of goodwill.

  Gus brushed her arm reassuringly as he stepped alongside her. The commander’s gaze sharpened as he took note of Gus’s physique. “Remove your glasses,” he ordered. “You may not wear them.”

  Tension rippled through the team members at this sudden show of hostility.

  “Por favor,” Gus murmured convincingly. “I’m blind without them.”

  Unmoved by his plea, the commander nodded at his deputy, who snatched the spectacles from Gus’s eyes and tossed them to the ground, crushing the wire rims under his booted heel.

  An uncomfortable silence ensued.

  Then Marquez gestured up the path with his stainless-steel AK-47. “Regresemos!” he shouted, and his gaggle of armed teens did an about-face, slogging wordlessly up the trail they’d just traversed, looking bedraggled and depressed.

  With that, the UN team began their march into the jungle, hastening to keep pace with the diminutive natives, who covered the ground swiftly, challenging them at once to keep up.

  “Faster!” ordered Deputy Buitre.

  With the mud sucking at her boots and the drizzle wetting her hair, Lucy cut a sidelong glance at Gus. She found his gaze alert, constantly moving, assessing their environment. Had she really thought she could do this without him? Heck, a part of being self-reliant was knowing how to use your assets, and Gus was definitely an asset she didn’t want to lose.

  Vegetation thickened and rose up, creating a tangled wall on either side. The path became an erratic corridor surrounded by hedges too lush to penetrate. Then, finally, it closed over their heads, swallowing them.

  The trail grew steeper and narrower as it rose vertically up the mountain. Rainwater had carved out the middle of it, turning the trail into a V-shaped gulley, murder on Lucy’s ankles, even in boots. She pushed herself, wondering how the others, those who didn’t exercise as rigorously as she and Gus, would fare.

  On the heels of that thought, Bellini and the Turkish woman began to flounder. Lucy, Carlos, and Gus stepped up to help. Gripping the Turkish woman’s arm, Lucy was conscious of Deputy Buitre’s dark stare as he prodded them up the slippery clay path, offering no assistance.

  As Fournier had predicted, they weren’t going to be afforded preferential treatment. This trek into the jungle might prove more arduous than any of them had bargained for.

  They came abruptly upon a hacked-out clearing. Lucy breathed a sigh of relief to see five mules dozing in a circle around a mound of cloth sacks, hides quivering to keep the pestering insects off.

  “Halt!” shouted the deputy. “Stand in a circle and remove all your clothing but your boots and undergarments.”

  Damn, Lucy thought, reluctantly shrugging off her backpack, while ignoring Gus’s raised eyebrow.

  “Throw your possessions into the center of the circle.”

  “Commander, sir,” Fournier hedged respectfully, “could we keep our anti-malarial medication?”

  “No.” Marquez’s reply was implacable.

  Lucy was afraid of that. Now they would be at risk for contracting mosquito-borne malarial infection.

  “Now your clothing,” the commander added. “Strip to your underwear and your boots.”

  At least their intel had been right. They got to keep their boots. The FARC couldn’t afford to shoe them all, especially not the men, whose feet were bigger than the average rebel’s.

  Lucy’s relief didn’t quite counter her self-consciousness at having to shrug off her sweater and pull down her pants. When Gus sidled over to block the men’s view of her, he was jabbed in the ribs by a kid no more than fifteen years old.

  Intentionally humiliated, each UN team member was made to stand for an uncertain moment in their underwear. That morning, Lucy had removed the Band-Aid stuck to her hip. It would have gone unnoticed, anyway, as she stood with her back to the trees.

  In his near-naked splendor, Gus once again inspired the commander’s suspicions. He circled Gus to examine his musculature. “You’re strong, eh?” he asked, punching him lightly in the stomach.

  Gus’s abs flexed. “I lift weights at the gym,” he explained.

  “You know how to shoot a gun?” the man asked.

  “No, no,” Gus denied, lying. “I can’t see the target.”

  Commander Marquez grunted. “I’ll be watching you,” he warned, his scruffy moustache twitching. Turning away, he barked orders that prompted soldiers to scuttle up with armloads of clothing. That was when Lucy realized two of them were girls.

  Stepping into the stiff, itchy camouflage pants, she pulled them up to find them several inches too short. The green T-shirt she was given exuded a soapy smell that made her nose itch. Its soft fabric protected her from the chafing jacket that she buttoned up next. It would keep her warm in lieu of her sweater, which had been bagged, along with everyone else’s clothing.

  “Mount the mules,” the commander ordered the minute they were dressed.

  Assisted onto a burlap and leather saddle, Lucy groped for the horn as the mules swayed up the vertical path, their footing as uncertain as hers had been earlier. Oh, God. Maybe Gus had been right about fighting fire with fire. It wasn’t working.

  But then she saw that Gus had it even worse. With his feet too big to fit into the stirrups, his only option for staying mounted was to squeeze the mule’s round belly between his knees and hold
on tight.

  Lucy’s gaze dropped to the knee-high, needle-sharp bamboo spears that lined the path, the product of machetes cutting through the overgrowth. If Gus were to fall, any one of those spears could puncture his chest.

  They had just reached the crest of a hill when a clatter of gunfire ripped through the tangled growth, startling their entourage.

  Lucy’s mule reared. With a stifled scream, she slipped sideways. Her foot tangled in the opposite stirrup, spilling her upside down. With her head just inches off the ground, she heard Gus shout her name—in English.

  A barrage of gunfire drowned it out.

  Marquez roared out an order, and his little army scattered.

  Jerking her foot free, Lucy fell to the path, just avoiding the needle-sharp bamboo spikes. She scrambled from the mule as it pranced in terror. Her reaction to the danger, the sounds of gunfire, were automatic, instinctually ingrained.

  All hell had broken loose. Bullets peppered the trees and thumped into the humus-covered earth around them. The FARC soldiers started firing back, putting the UN team members squarely in the middle of a firefight.

  “Over here,” Gus called, herding them toward a grove of bamboo just above the path.

  Seeing Fournier down on his knees and struggling to rise, Lucy went to offer him a hand, ignoring Gus’s shout to turn back. She had just pulled the Frenchman off the trail when the whistle of a mortar shell had her diving for cover. In the next instant, Gus landed on top of her, driving the air from her lungs as the ground shook and globs of mud and spongy lichen rained down on them.

  “What’s happening?” she wheezed in the shocked quiet that followed.

  “Colombian army,” he whispered in her ear.

  Ah, shit. The bastards had tracked them down, after all. And despite the JIC’s attempts to call them off, they were ruining the UN team’s prospects for negotiating Howitz and Barnes’s release.

  Another barrage of gunfire echoed through the undergrowth, continuing for what seemed an eternity. Lucy closed her eyes tight, expecting at any minute to be blown into little pieces. But then she realized Gus was covering every inch of her body. If they were struck dead-on or hit with shrapnel, he’d be the one who died, not her.

  Oh, God, no. There was no way in hell she was going to be a liability and cost Gus his life, just because he thought she couldn’t handle the op.

  She tried to roll over, to shake him off her, only she couldn’t. Gus had her thoroughly pinned. “Hold still,” he ordered, impatient with her struggles.

  The gunfire intensified. Adolescent voices shouted back and forth. Someone screamed in pain. The mountain trembled under her ear.

  There was no way ten FARC rebels, six of whom looked to be under the age of eighteen, could hold off an army battalion indefinitely. When their ammunition ran out, the army would swoop in and arrest the survivors. For the teens, who’d likely been coerced to join the FARC anyway, that could only be good news. For Gus and Lucy it would mean an end to the mission.

  But then, as suddenly as the gunfire had started, it stopped.

  The cautious twitter of birds and the screeching of howler monkeys seemed to indicate that the interlopers had fled. Either that or the FARC were all dead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Wait,” whispered Gus when she tried to move.

  “I can’t breathe,” she gasped, causing him to ease cautiously off her. He signaled to the other team members to watch and listen.

  Many minutes later, the FARC began to creep out of hiding. Marquez’s voice, like nails on chalkboard, shouted orders for all to regroup so he could make an account of the injured.

  Fournier, shaken but still asserting his leadership, urged the UN team to rejoin the group.

  Deputy Buitre was the first to spy them, slithering down from higher ground. “¡Traidores!” he screamed, storming down the trail to confront them. “They led the army straight to us!” He lunged for Fournier, pulling him nose to nose. Hauling a handgun from his holster, he thrust the barrel into the man’s white hair, his black eyes flashing with fury.

  “Cálmate,” ordered his commander, and Deputy Buitre restrained himself, breathing heavily. It was clear if it were left to him, he’d have killed Fournier that very instant.

  Lucy watched with pity as a wet stain bloomed on the crotch of Fournier’s ill-fitting pants.

  Marquez bore down on them. “Is this the thanks I get for having you as my guests?” he demanded with thunderous suspicion. “Is this how the UN means to treat the FARC, by betraying us to the enemy?”

  Fournier, his voice quaking with fear, stuttered his reassurances. “We swear, we had no way of knowing we were being followed. Two soldiers on a motorcycle trailed us out of Villavicencio yesterday, but we left them far behind.”

  The accusations disgusted Lucy. “Why would we risk ourselves in the crossfire?” she interjected without thinking.

  The commander and the deputy swiveled hostile glares at her. Gus touched her arm in warning. But it felt good to challenge the rebels, her fear overcome for the moment.

  “We could have just as easily been killed as you,” Gus pointed out mildly, his reasonableness diffusing their rage.

  “Our only agenda is to find a peaceful resolution so the hostages may be freed,” Fournier added. “We are not at war with you.”

  With mistrust still brimming in his eyes, the commander ordered Deputy Buitre to stow his gun. Then he and his assistant turned their attention to the soldiers who’d been wounded.

  Lucy and the others sat on the muddy trail and waited. Dazed by the hostilities they had endured already, they consoled each other with murmured words of solidarity and encouragement.

  “Things can only get easier from here out,” Fournier assured them.

  Lucy slid a wry glance at Gus’s carefully blank expression. Could the man really be that naive?

  Within an hour, the Turkish woman started vomiting—altitude sickness. They had climbed the mountain, relentlessly, for hours. Too weak to keep her seat on her mule, S¸ukruye was foisted off on Lucy, as the men’s mules were already overloaded. Now Lucy was soaking wet, covered with mud, and had vomit on her right boot.

  They journeyed on, relentlessly, crisscrossing trails, possibly even doubling back to confuse the UN team members.

  Then they came to a river so swollen with rain it had carved a gorge of boiling, rushing water. Their only way to cross it was via a box, drawn by pulleys across a steel cable.

  Hell, why not? Lucy thought, choking down the sudden, near hysterical urge to laugh as she met Gus’s grave gaze. “Fire with fire,” she said to him in Spanish, earning quizzical looks from the others.

  By the time they stepped onto land on the other side, S¸ ukruye had nearly fainted from fear, and even Lucy felt weak in the knees. Having left the mules behind, they were forced to walk again, into a jungle that grew increasingly dark.

  Her stomach began to burn from hunger, yet they neither spoke nor stopped for food. The only sound besides the splashing and stamping of their feet was the incessant chatter of jungle creatures. Higher and higher they climbed, into the deepening gloom.

  An exchange between the FARC leaders broke the silence. Suspending the march, they decided to make camp, right there in the thick of the jungle.

  Let the bugfest begin, thought Lucy, scratching at half a dozen bug bites on her neck.

  Gus scooped a glob of dirt off the trail and smeared it on his face. “Here,” he said, offering some to Lucy. “It’ll keep the bugs off.”

  She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Mud? Are you kidding?”

  “What’s worse? A little mud, or malaria?”

  He was right, of course. With a shudder, she accepted the glob of cold soil and applied it delicately to her face and neck.

  The rebels, in the meantime, had hacked a clearing with their machetes. Lashing bamboo together with vines, they built platforms for their guests, stringing hammocks for themselves around the periphery of the camp. A fire was lit t
o boil the rice and quickly snuffed out.

  Huddled on their platforms, each team member was offered a cup of rice to eat and a sweet beverage of boiled sugar cane called panela. With nightfall came the emergence of still more insects—buzzing, whirring, and screeching until Lucy longed to cover her ears.

  They were ordered to relieve themselves and go to sleep.

  Lying on their bamboo bed, shivering with cold, and soaking wet, Lucy felt nothing but relief when Gus pulled her on top of him. She shuddered silently against him, shamelessly absorbing his body heat.

  “How’s the hip?” he whispered in her ear, placing a gentle hand over the area in question.

  “Fine.” It had hurt until he touched it, his hand warm and soothing.

  “Your feet?” he breathed. “Any blisters?”

  Her feet were used to worse punishment than a hike. “Nope,” she assured him, cringing as a flurry of wings tickled her cheek. God, she hated camping! “Could you find your way back?” she heard herself whisper.

  “It’d take me a while,” he admitted. “It’s too late to change your mind now, Luce,” he added.

  “I haven’t,” she assured him.

  “Good. Try to sleep,” he urged in a voice too quiet for anyone else to overhear. “Tomorrow I’ll search you for leeches and jungle ticks.”

  Lucy’s breath caught. “You’re kidding right?”

  “Sadly, no.”

  She grew conscious of every squirming, creeping thing around her. Wilderness stretched for miles in every direction. An ancient and instinctive fear rose up in her as she considered the possibility of a jaguar lurking close by.

  Snapping her eyes shut, she tried to melt into the solid warmth of the man holding her. With her stomach still hungry, she doubted she would sleep any better tonight than she had the night before. Out here, there was nowhere to run.

  Midmorning the following day, the trail ended abruptly, spilling the guerrillas and UN peace-keepers into a partial clearing.

  A handful of buildings stood in a thin, wet mist. Chickens pecked aimlessly in the mud. What was probably once the farm of a campesino had been commandeered by the FARC’s forty-eighth front and turned into an outpost, the perimeter of which was guarded by a fifty-caliber machine gun.