The trail passed a muddy hill the size of a school bus, covered with thin patches of grass and a dense storm of clawed animal tracks. Pale knobby stones were visible amid the crumbling mud. Lisa continued on, her mind on the road ahead. I glanced at the hill, wondering why its grass was so emaciated when the rest of the jungle was teeming with life.
Then I came to a sudden stop and said, hoarsely, “Lisa.”
“What?”
“Those aren’t stones.”
We advanced slowly, crouched, and examined the gnawed bones protruding from the earth as if they were some fragile and valuable archaeological discovery. Then without speaking we began to circumnavigate the grassy mound. On the the other side one of the misshapen holes dug by animals revealed a human skull and most of a hand. The hand had belonged to an adult. The skull was so small it had to be a child’s, maybe an infant’s.
“Oh my God.” I backed away as if some horrific demon-thing lurked within the mound. It was big enough for dozens of corpses. A hundred. Maybe more. “Why? Who?” “The paramilitaries.” Lisa’s voice, unlike mine, was flat. “The FARC, the Marxist guerrillas, they’re still active around here. The indigenous tribes and campesinos tend to support them. So the paramilitaries have this strategy called ‘draining the water where the fishes swim.’ They massacre a village or two to convince everyone else in the area to abandon their homes and run like hell. Leaving no local support for the FARC, and new land for the paras to use.”
“Which they use to start growing cocaine,” I guessed.
She laughed harshly. “No need to start. It’s already there. The FARC make plenty of money from it too. Don’t get the wrong idea, they’re as bad as the paras.”
“So, wait.” I was confused. “The guys after us, are they narcos, or paras, or FARC, or what? What’s the difference?”
“Does it matter?”
I supposed it didn’t. I couldn’t stop staring at the baby’s skull, even though it made me feel even weaker and queasier than I already was. I wondered if it had been a boy or girl, and how many other children had been in there, and how they had died. Had they seen their parents murdered? Had they been buried alive?
“It’s complicated,” Lisa said. “Everyone’s a narco. The FARC, the paras, and the cartels, they don’t really give a shit about politics any more. Cocaine is their lifeblood, and they’re all in bed with each other. In some areas you get the FARC and the paras, theoretically sworn enemies, making mafia turf agreements to keep the cocaine flowing for everyone. Money trumps politics.” She motioned at the hill. “But the guys who did this are paras. The FARC might set off car bombs but they don’t slaughter campesinos wholesale. The guys after us are probably the same ones that did this, but who knows?”
“No wonder that cowboy ran away.”
“Yeah. In a sick way this is good news. If I was him I wouldn’t exactly run to tell anyone, not if I knew about this, I’d pretend I never saw nothing.” She considered. “If we keep following these trails we’re bound to run into a road eventually. The question is whether we run into them -” She stopped, tilted her head as if listening. “Aw, shit.”
After a second I heard it too. A faraway whining buzz, like a colossal mosquito in the distance. Another drone.
Chapter 14
“Your phone’s off, right?” Lisa demanded.
I nodded. “But there are cameras on those things. We better get under cover.”
She retreated from the grave and into the thick jungle around it.
“I don’t know,” I reconsidered as I followed. “If we stay off the trails that’ll slow us down, right?”
“And if we stay on them they’ll see us.”
“I don’t know.” I tried to weigh the possibilities. “I doubt they’re watching the video streams in real time. I mean, in theory they could, there’s an antenna on the drone, but it would be low bandwidth, and they’d need a big-ass ground transceiver. Probably all they can do is look at the video when the drone lands.”
“How do they land? There weren’t any wheels on the one in the school.”
“You catch them in a net.” I returned to my topic. “Once you got the videos back there’d be hours of footage to study, it would take a person forever. But you can train Sophie’s neural nets to look for human figures in video, and that would be a lot faster, maybe a couple minutes. Maybe they can do that, maybe they can’t.”
“In short,” Lisa summarized, “your detailed technical analysis has led you to the conclusion that you have no clue.”
I shook my head, frustrated. “It all depends on their resources, and – no. No idea. Why do they have UAVs out here in the middle of the fucking jungle to begin with? Just sitting aroud waiting to hunt us down? This is crazy. Those things have carbon fibre airframes. They must cost half a million dollars each. Where did they get them?”
“That’s small change to the cartels,” Lisa said. “When I started working Colombia I realized they’re so big you can’t think of them as criminal gangs. You have to think of them as a whole parallel shadow state within the state. How much can one of those things carry? What’s the payload?”
“Depends how much range you want to sacrifice.” I considered. “My guess is with a fully charged fuel cell one could carry ten kilos of high explosive maybe five hundred kilometres. Three hundred miles.”
“Or ten kilos of pure cocaine. Street value eight hundred thousand dollars.”
I looked at her. That hadn’t occurred to me.
“I bet they’re mostly used for smuggling,” she said. “Fly them at night over empty terrain. You don’t have to worry about couriers or roadblocks. That’s why they’ve got them here. There are cocaine factories in these hills, turning the leaves into coca paste. I bet the drones take it from here to Darien or the Pacific coast for export. It’s brilliant. And they can use them to kill anyone with a cell phone. The perfect weapon, and the perfect mule.” Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know how we’re going to stop them.”
“Not just a cell phone,” I said. “You could easily train a neural net to target a license plate. Maybe even a face. Or even easier, a particular set of GPS coordinates, if there’s some building or home you’re after.”
“Well, that’s just wonderful.”
In the distance, the sound of the drone began to fade away.
“Hey.” An idea had just flickered alight in my head. “Give me your phone.”
Lisa stared at me. “What for?”
“We can make sure that drone doesn’t come back. And maybe make them think they got us, and blaze a trail for whoever comes to rescue us.”
Her eyes widened as she understood. “And for the narcos.”
“You think they don’t already have a pretty good idea?”
After a moment she nodded, produced an old-fashioned Motorola Razr from her pocket, and passed it over. I worried it might have been ruined by the rain, I didn’t want to sacrifice my iPhone and its precious GPS and area photo, but the Razr came to life readily enough. I waited just long enough to see if there might be a signal, hoping against hope, but no; so I folded it shut again, turned, and lobbed it onto the the mass grave.
“Come on,” I said. “We better hurry.”
I was still wracked by countless pains and complete physical exhaustion, but I felt a little stronger as we limped on down the trail. Maybe it was the food, or the coca; and maybe it was because I had just done something that might affect the outcome, and so felt like I had once again become, at least in part, the author of my own fate.
A few minutes later we hid in the bush while the drone flashed overhead. Shortly afterwards we heard a hollow bang, more penetrating than loud. It reminded me of explosions you heard sometimes on ski trails, when they tried to set off avalanches in nearby hills. Remembering myself on skis above Lake Tahoe was like remembering a dream of a different world.
“I hope that was a good idea,” Lisa muttered.
I didn’t answer.
