Guatemala – Journey into Evil Page 8

  The outskirts of the city proved uglier than the centre. The buildings grew less prosperous, a matter of breezeblocks and corrugated iron, with rusty steel rods poking optimistically through their roofs. The wide highways were choked with traffic, and to judge from the look and smell of the air, any concern over car emissions had yet to reach Guatemala. Bus after crowded bus went by, each pursued by the black cloud of its own exhaust.

  And then suddenly the limousine was pulling out across a wide bridge over a deep ravine, and they could see the city stretching away across the plateau behind them. Ahead of them a land of mountains and valleys receded into the distance, but for the moment their eyes were drawn down into the ravine, where another city, this one arranged in ragged rows of tumbledown shacks, clung to the steep slopes. There was rubbish everywhere, and a smell wafting up from the depths which seemed composed of equal parts of sewage and rotting vegetation.

  ‘Too many people come to the city,’ Gómez explained. ‘There is no room for them all. But they will not go back to their villages.’

  ‘Why not?’ Chris asked.

  Gómez shrugged. ‘Who knows? I think they expect a miracle.’

  They drove another ten kilometres down the Pan-American Highway, before using one of the observation point lay-bys to turn around. The countryside was certainly beautiful, but it was hard to shake the visual memory of the city in the ravine. Even Gómez seemed slightly subdued, though he seemed fully recovered by the time they got back to the hotel. It was now five o’clock, and he cheerfully insisted on their all eating dinner that evening at his home. Razor declined, pleading tiredness, but both Gómez and Hajrija looked so disappointed that he suggested the following evening instead. This proposal was greeted with a huge smile from the lieutenant. He would collect them at six the following evening, though of course he would be checking with them again before then.

  When he was gone, Hajrija turned on Razor with an air of amused exasperation. ‘What’s wrong with you English?’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you like meeting people?’

  The three of them ate in the hotel restaurant that evening, at one end of a table laid for about twenty. Without any conscious decision being made, they avoided talking about either Guatemala or the job the two men were about to embark on. Chris asked the others if they had heard from Jamie Docherty, and Hajrija told him about the recent postcard from Chile. ‘The beach at Valparaiso,’ she said. ‘It looked just like the Mediterranean. He said things were going well, but there weren’t any details. Isabel has a job with a publisher, but we don’t know what he’s doing, if anything.’

  ‘Maybe he’s writing his memoirs,’ Razor suggested.

  ‘If he isn’t he should be,’ Chris said.

  ‘I could play myself in the movie,’ Razor decided.

  ‘We all could,’ Chris agreed.

  She looked at them both with amusement, then suddenly remembered something. ‘I had a letter from Nena,’ she told Chris. ‘Nothing’s changed in Zavik. Which I suppose is good news.’

  Chris grunted his agreement. When the three of them had left the Bosnian mountain town with Docherty, Damien Robson (the ‘Dame’), six wounded children and one wounded old man, Hajrija’s friend Nena had stayed behind, along with her estranged husband Reeve and their two children. In the meantime the town had obviously managed to sustain itself as an oasis of peace in a desert of ethnic madness.

  ‘Another beer?’ Razor asked the other two. Remembering those weeks, and the months that had followed, he still sometimes felt like pinching himself. He had journeyed into the horror of Bosnia’s war and come back to England happier than he had ever been in his life, a metamorphosis whose only price tag had been several months of recurrent nightmares. According to the SAS shrink they had been his way of expressing the guilt that survivors of tragedies often felt, a questioning of one’s right to the life and happiness which so many others had been denied.

  And this was the first time the three of them had been outside England together since those days, Razor realized, as the waiter finally noticed his outstretched arm. Maybe that was one reason for the uneasiness he was feeling. Maybe Guatemala was as innocent as Disneyland.

  ‘A penny for ’em,’ Chris said, looking at him.

  ‘He’s probably thinking about Tottenham,’ Hajrija said crushingly.

  ‘Christ!’ Razor exploded, ‘I still don’t know what happened yesterday.’ He pushed back his seat and stood up. ‘Order the beers. I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Hajrija shouted after him, but he had already disappeared through the doorway which led to the lobby.

  ‘He’s gone to ring the Embassy,’ Chris told her.

  ‘The British Embassy will have the football results?’

  ‘Someone there will have heard them on the World Service.’

  ‘The World Service,’ she echoed. ‘You know, we used to listen to that in Sarajevo, when we were on sniper watch. It was kind of strange, listening to Dave Lee Travis while you waited for a clear shot.’

  Chris looked at her. It was sometimes hard to believe that Razor’s wife was the same person as the young combat veteran he and Docherty had first met in a seedy hotel near Sarajevo station. He suddenly had an idea. ‘What are you going to do when we head up-country?’ he asked.

  ‘Do some travelling around, I guess.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you spend some time with my family in Antigua – I mean the people I’ve been staying with. I was booked in until this Saturday, so I doubt they’ll have found anyone else. I can call them and ask.’

  She thought about it for a second, and then nodded. ‘And if you two aren’t back by the weekend I can go on to Panajachel. That’s where…’

  A whoop in the distance interrupted her.

  ‘They won,’ Chris said unnecessarily.

  The following morning Lieutenant Gómez arrived while they were having breakfast. Their departure for Uspantan was still scheduled for early the next day, and his family was excited at the prospect of meeting them all that evening. He approved of Hajrija’s plan to stay in Antigua for a few days – ‘It is much safer for a woman alone there than here,’ he said apologetically – and didn’t seem offended when they declined his offer of another day in the limousine. He had one cup of coffee and left again, promising to pick them up at six o’clock.

  Chris announced his intention of going off in search of the Botanical Garden, partly out of a genuine desire to see it, and partly because he sensed that the other two would like to spend at least some of their last free day with no more than each other for company. He returned in time to take a shower before meeting Gómez in the entrance, and the two of them waited fifteen minutes for the others to come down.

  ‘Sorry,’ Razor said, when they finally did so. ‘Our siesta got out of hand,’ he added mysteriously.

  Gómez didn’t seem to notice – he was too busy keeping up a non-stop flow of nervous conversation. This evening was important to him, the two Englishmen belatedly realized.

  Instead of the limousine, Gómez had his own Toyota waiting outside. He drove well enough, though his habit of looking over his shoulder to converse with those in the back was somewhat alarming. After about twenty minutes they pulled into the parking lot of a modern-looking apartment block.

  They were in Zona 10, Chris noted from a street sign, a step down from the luxury of Zona 14, but several steps up from just about anywhere else.

  The apartment itself was clean, tidy and decorated throughout in a safe modern style. Lita Gómez was an attractive Ladina with a mass of dark curls, dark eyes, full mouth and a body teetering on the edge of plumpness. She wore a bright-green dress, high-heeled shoes of the same colour, and large gold earrings. Her English wasn’t as good as her husband’s, but good enough to make herself understood. At first she also seemed nervous, but her natural ebullience quickly won out, and within ten minutes she and Hajrija were talking like long-lost friends.

  The two boys, one ten and th
e other eight, were obviously miffed at having to miss watching TV, but they nevertheless joined in the conversation with their father and the two SAS men, and in the process displayed a patience and politeness which many an English parent would have died for. Both wanted to be soldiers when they grew up, a fact which obviously both pleased and worried their father. Razor found himself liking the man more in his home than he had in the limousine.

  The dinner was delicious, but seemed little more Guatemalan than the décor. The conversation moved easily enough from travel to TV, fashion to music, food to sports. Lita was enthralled by the story of how Razor and Hajrija had met, and her husband, to Chris’s complete surprise, turned out to have a library of books on bird-watching almost as large as his own. The two boys insisted on showing Razor their collection of World Cup bubblegum cards. The thorny subject of politics surfaced only once, and then only in connection with President Clinton’s abortive attempt to end the American baseball strike.

  All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, and leaving the brightly lit family apartment for the dark and vaguely sinister streets of the city felt almost traumatic. Sitting in the back of the Toyota with Hajrija, Razor had a picture of a society living in rigid, self-contained compartments. As long as you stayed in your compartment, he thought, then things could be OK. The Ladinos, or at least some of them, had their wealth and their dreams of an American consumerist world. The Indians had something else, something which he didn’t suppose he would ever understand. And whether or not that something made up, or more than made up, for their downtrodden situation he couldn’t begin to know.

  The problem was the compartments themselves. Ricardo Gómez and El Espíritu might both be reasonable human beings in their own little spaces, but that was only half the story. When people lived in such ignorance of each other, then opening doors became a dangerous business. In such situations the first reaction was usually shock, and the second was often cruelty.

  Razor thought about Gómez sitting in the driver’s seat in front of him, and caught him smiling in the rear-view mirror, presumably with pleasure at how well the evening had gone. Earlier he had watched him reading bedtime stories to his two boys, and noted how much enjoyment all three had derived from this simple ritual.

  Once in the mountains, Razor asked himself, would this Gómez and his comrades all metamorphose into something else, Guatemalan Jekylls into Hydes, family men into the torturers for which their army was notorious?

  5

  There was a brisk rap on the door. ‘Es cuarto para las dos,’ a voice said softly.

  ‘OK,’ Razor half shouted in reply, and groaned as the footsteps outside receded. ‘Shit, I’m getting too old for this,’ he muttered.

  ‘Another day in paradise,’ Chris said from the bunk above.

  Their small barracks room was far from pitch-dark: the faintest of natural lights was seeping in through the small window and a brighter electric glow was outlining the ill-fitting door.

  ‘If they’ve got the lights on out there, we might as well have ours on in here,’ Chris said, lowering himself to the floor and reaching for the switch.

  The two men, both already dressed in their jungle combat fatigues, sat side by side on the lower bunk lacing up their boots, and then took turns with the small hand mirror and make-up kit.

  ‘I must have been a beautician in an earlier life,’ Razor remarked, admiring his own handiwork.

  ‘Frankenstein’s, I should think.’

  Razor laughed, and ran one last check on the Mini-Uzi 9mm sub-machine-gun. The SAS did not normally carry Uzis, but the gun’s worldwide popularity with terrorists and counter-terrorists alike had made familiarization a necessary part of their training. Razor didn’t find the Uzi as user-friendly as the Heckler & Koch MP5, but there was no doubting its simple reliability. And with any luck, this time around he wouldn’t have to do anything other than carry it.

  It was one minute to two. ‘Ready?’ he asked Chris, who nodded. The two men pulled the unusually lightweight bergens over their shoulders, donned their floppy jungle camouflage hats, and let themselves out into the corridor.

  The eighty-strong assault company of Kaibiles had already evacuated the barracks, which Razor supposed was a good sign. He had watched them do their physical training on the base’s football pitch the previous afternoon and been provisionally impressed. They were fit, and they looked tough, not to say downright mean. They had the weapons – Uzis, recoilless rifles, mortars – and tactical air support when it was needed. Whether they could fight was something else.

  It was considerably darker outside, though no obvious attempt was being made to conceal their departure from any watchers in either the nearby town or the surrounding hills. Maybe Colonel Cabrera had decided that the sound of the trucks would be enough in itself to torpedo any hopes of the company sneaking away unobserved. Maybe he was right.

  Lieutenant Gómez, his smile a little more nervous than usual, was waiting to guide them into the second of the four trucks. The SAS men squeezed in beside the grinning Kaibiles, and a few moments later the driver put the truck in gear and pulled slowly away, passing under the sentry tower which loomed above the gate and rolling down the road towards the town. Through the open back of the truck they could see the bright headlights of the two following vehicles and the faint silhouette of the sentry tower against a moonless sky.

  The trucks rumbled down Uspantan’s cobbled streets, and swung left around the square, past the pale cathedral and up another steep street of silent houses. There was a brief glimpse of cornfields clinging to steep valley sides before a forest engulfed the road in darkness. Two hours, Cabrera had told them. Razor sat back and closed his eyes.

  They had left Guatemala City soon after eight on the morning of the previous day. The Chinook CH-47D had lifted off from the military side of Aurora Airport, rising up through thick mist to reveal the flat crest of a distant volcano floating serenely on the layer of low cloud, and then headed north across a landscape of hills and valleys which seemed to have been first modelled in papier mâché, then draped in earth and trees. Mist swirled in the valley bottoms, and verdant mountains rose in the distance through layers of fluffy white cloud. Ribbons of winding road connected small towns, each of them laid out on the familiar grid pattern, each with a shining white church at its centre. Uspantan had been the last of these, and the Chinook had flown low over the central square before touching down at the base above the town.

  Colonel Cabrera had been there to meet them, along with his number two, whom he introduced as Major Romeo Valdez Osorio. The major was clean-shaven, and as fair-skinned for a Guatemalan Hispanic as the colonel was dark. He had wavy, chestnut-brown hair, serious blue eyes, and seemed to be in his early thirties. His hands, Razor noticed, were beautifully manicured. His greeting had been polite but guarded.

  Cabrera had seemed a different proposition from the man they had met in Serrano’s villa. Perhaps he had found those circumstances inhibiting, because here, back in his natural habitat, he was all wide smiles and expansive gestures, and full of enthusiasm for the job in hand. At the dinner table he and the other officers had plied the two SAS men with questions about the Falklands War, a subject in which they were surprisingly well versed. They had little sympathy for their Latin American comrades-in-arms – as one officer put it: ‘The Argentines should stick to football.’

  Now, sitting in the heaving truck, Razor wondered where Cabrera and Osorio were. Probably in the truck’s cab, he guessed. It had to be more comfortable than the back.

  Any trace of a paved road had long since vanished, and every now and then the rear wheels would live up to their name, rearing up like the proverbial bucking bronco, and crashing the company back down on their tail-bones with jarring effect. Bloody torture, Razor thought, and smiled grimly to himself in the dark. That was probably not a diplomatic phrase to use in this part of the world.

  Next to him Chris seemed to be sleeping through it all, which had to rate as s
ome kind of miracle. Razor thought about his wife, who would soon be starting her second day in Antigua, and wished to God he was there with her.

  The journey ground on, the trucks fighting their way up the dirt track into the Cuchumatanes. It was a quarter to four when they reached their destination, and disgorged the troops on to the road. Jumping down gratefully, the two Englishmen found themselves surrounded by dense forest, and a silence broken only by the shuffling of human feet. The only light came from the starfields twinkling above the canopy of trees.

  Ten metres away they could see Cabrera and Osorio examining a map by torchlight with a small man in civilian clothes. As if aware of their eyes on him, the man glanced in their direction, and they could see his Indian features reflected in the yellow light. His expression seemed almost unnaturally neutral, as if life had burned the emotion out of him.

  Razor found himself thinking about all the Westerns he had watched as a kid. The Indian scout who helped the white men had usually come to a bad end.

  The first of the Kaibiles filed off down an invisible path. Gómez inserted himself and the two Englishmen somewhere in the middle of the departing column, and for the next hour and a half they trekked up and down hills, through trees and across bare slopes, seeing little more than the man directly in front of them. Razor was impressed by the disciplined silence of the Guatemalan soldiers, and by how at home they seemed in the wilderness. Whatever else the Kaibiles might be, they were not parade-ground soldiers.

  There was still no sign of light in the eastern sky when the column arrived at the location selected for the ambush. The SAS men had been shown a small-scale map of the immediate area – a thickly wooded narrow valley which carried a path allegedly used by the guerrillas – but for the moment they had to take the geography on trust. Along with Gómez they were allocated to the reserve platoon, which was under orders to seek concealment high on the valley side, some fifty metres above the units charged with initially engaging the enemy. Whether this was to keep them out of harm’s way or to prevent them from witnessing any over-exuberance on the part of the Kaibiles, it was impossible to say. Maybe a bit of both.