The drive to the farmstead was easy, first-gear, four-wheel work. After the farm, it was all slog. He got the vehicle an extra mile through dense jungle, descended in the darkness, walked ahead, found a gully, and crashed it. He left what he intended the trackers to find and took the rest. It was heavy. The heat, even in the night, was oppressive. The notion that jungles at night are quiet places is a fallacy. They rustle, they croak, they roar, but they do not have spirits.
Using his compass and flashlight, he marched west, then south, for about a mile, slashing with one of his machetes to create a kind of path. After a mile he left the other part of what he intended the pursuers to find and, lightened at last to a small haversack, water bottle, flashlight, and second machete, pressed on toward the river bank.
He reached the Commini at dawn, well upstream of the crossing point and ferry. The inflatable airmattress would not have been his crossing of choice, but it sufficed. Prone on the navyblue canvas, he paddled with both hands, withdrawing them from the water when a deadly cottonmouth, or it might have been a water moccasin, glided past. The beady, lidless eye gazed at him from a few inches away, but the snake pressed on downstream.
An hour's paddling and drifting brought him to the Sunname bank. The trusty airmattress was stabbed into oblivion and abandoned. It was midmorning when the stained, streaked, wet figure, mottled with mosquito bites and hung with leeches, stumbled onto the road back to Parbo. After five miles a friendly market trader allowed him to ride the cargo of watermelons the last fifty miles to the capital.
Even the kind souls at the Krasnopolsky would have raised an eyebrow at their English businessman turning up in such a state, so he changed in the lockup store, used a garage washroom and a gas lighter to burn off the leeches, and returned to his hotel for a lunch of steak and fries, plus several bottles of Parbo. Then he slept.
Thirty thousand feet up, the company Lear jet drifted down the eastern seaboard of the United States with Kevin McBride as its only passenger. "This," he mused, "is the kind of transportation I really could force myself to get used to."
They refuelled at the spook-haven air base of Eglin, northern Florida, and again at Barbados. There was a car waiting at San Martin City airfield to bring the CIA man to Colonel Moreno's secret police headquarters in an oil palm forest on the outskirts of town.
The fat colonel greeted his visitor in his office with a bottle of whiskey.
"I guess a tad early fd'r, me, Colonel," said McBride.
"Nonsense, my friend, never too early for a toast. ComeÉI propose. Death to our enemies."
They drank. McBride, at that hour and in that heat, would have preferred a decent coffee.
"What have you got for me, Colonel?"
"A little exposition. Better I show you."
There was a conference room next to the office, and it had clearly been arranged for the colonel's grisly "exposition." The central long table was covered with a white cloth, which contained one exhibit. Around the walls were four other tables with collections of mixed items. It was one of the smaller tables that Colonel Moreno approached first.
"I told you our friend, Mr. Watson, first panicked, drove down the main road, swerved up a track at the side, and attempted to find escape by driving straight through the jungle? Yes? Impossible. He crashed his off-road into a gully and could not get out. Today it stands in the yard beneath these windows. Here is part of what he abandoned in it."
Table one contained mainly heavy-duty clothing, spare boots, water pannikins, mosquito netting, repellent, and waterpurification tablets. Table two had a tent, pegs, lantern, and a canvas basin on a tripod, along with miscellaneous toiletries.
"Nothing I wouldn't have on any normal camping trip," remarked McBride.
"Quite right, my friend. He obviously thought he would be hiding in the jungle for some time, probably making an ambush for his target on the road out of El Punto. But that target hardly ever leaves by road at all, and when he does it is in an armoured limousine. This assassin was not very good. Still, when he abandoned his gear, he also abandoned this. Too heavy, perhaps."
At table three the colonel whisked a sheet off the contents. It was a Remington 30-06, with a huge Rhino scope sight and a box of shells. Purchasable in American gun stores as a hunting rifle, it would also take a human head away with no problem at all.
"Now," explained the fat man, enjoying his mastery of his list of discoveries, "at this point your man leaves the car and 80 percent of his equipment. He sets off on foot, probably aiming for the river. But he is not a jungle fighter. How do I know? No compass. Within three hundred meters he was lost, heading south into deeper jungle, not west to the river. When we found him, all this was scattered about."
The last table contained a water can (empty), bush hat, machete, flashlight. There were tough-soled combat boots, shreds of camouflage trousers and shirt, bits of a completely inappropriate seersucker jacket, a leather belt with brass buckle and sheath knife still looped onto the belt.
"That was all he was carrying when you found him?"
"That was all he was carrying when he died. In his panic, he left behind what he should have taken-his rifle. He might have defended himself at the end."
"So your men caught up with him and shot him?"
Colonel Moreno threw up both hands, palms forward, in a gesture of surprised innocence.
"Us? Shoot him? Unarmed? Of course not. We wanted him alive. No, no. He was dead by the midnight of the night he fled. Those who do not understand the jungle should not venture into it. Certainly not ill-equipped, at night, seized by panic. That is a deadly combination. Look." With self-adoring theatricality, he whipped the sheet off the centre table. The skeleton had been brought from the jungle in a body bag, feet still in the boots, rags still around the bones. A hospital doctor had been summoned to rearrange the bones in the right order. The dead man, or what was left of him, had been picked clean to the last tiny fragment of skin, flesh, and marrow.
"The key to what happened is here," said Colonel Moreno, tapping with his forefinger. The right femur had been snapped cleanly through the middle.
"From this we can deduce what happened, my friend. He panicked, he ran. By flashlight only, blindly, without a compass. He made it about a mile from the stranded car, then he caught his foot in a root, a hidden tree stump, a tangled vine. Down he went. Snap. One broken leg.
"Now he cannot run, he cannot walk, he cannot even crawl. With no gun he cannot even summon help. He can only shout, but to what end? You know we have jaguars in these jungles?
"Well, we do. Not many, but if one hundred and fifty pounds of fresh meat insists on shouting its head off, chances are a jaguar will find it. That's what happened here. The main limbs were scattered over a small clearing. It's a larder out there. The racoon eats fresh meat. Also the puma and the coati. Up in the tree canopy, the daylight will bring the forest vultures. Ever seen what they can do to a corpse? No? Not pretty, but thorough. At the end of them all, the fire ants.
"Nature's most fantastic cleaners. Fifty yards from the remains, we found the ants' nest. They send out scouts, you know. They cannot see, but their sense of smell is amazing; and, of course, within twenty hours he would have smelt to high heaven. Enough?"
"Enough," said McBride. Early though it might be; he fancied a second whiskey. Back in the colonel's office, the secret policemen laid out some smaller items. One steel watch, engraved MW on the back. A signet ring, no inscription.
"No wallet," said the Colonel. "One of the predators must have snatched it if it was made of leather. But tucked down one of the boots, still intact, we found this."