Chapter 8
The men hunting us were clearly visible from our vantage point behind the treeline. The two leaders were tall, young and handsome, in jeans and T-shirts; the other four were small and agelessly weathered, strong as tree trunks, in old and grimy clothes but with good boots. All carried well-worn rifles with banana-shaped magazines protruding from their base. AK-47 Kalashnikovs, the weapon of choice for cinematic bad guys everywhere, and apparently real ones too.
I didn’t understand how everything could have gone so wrong so fast. It was hard to believe that I was actually stranded in the Colombian jungle, that this was no movie, no corporate bonding exercise; that those men, if they found me, would torture and murder me.
They followed our muddy tracks to the riverbank. The young one wearing a red Che Guevera shirt, the opposite of camouflage, spoke into a handheld radio. We couldn’t hear anything over the river’s roar.
“They won’t try to cross,” I said to Reyes, trying to convince myself, whispering even though the river noise would have swallowed anything less than a shout. “It’s like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No one would try to cross that who didn’t have to.”
“They don’t need to,” she muttered back. “I can lip-read Spanish some. He’s calling friends on this side and telling them to come get us.”
I froze silent with new terror. I had dared to hope we might be relatively safe.
“Come on,” she said, “we better move.” She led the way deeper into the jungle.
I followed, but slipped, and had to grab a tree trunk to steady myself. The rustling leaves must have caught their attention. The hollow crackle of gunfire erupted behind me. I actually felt the slipstream as a bullet whizzed past my head. When I realized what it had been I sprinted forward, inspired by sheer mind-melting panic. Somehow I managed to mostly go around instead of through the trees and thorn bushes. I nearly ran Reyes over before I realized that she had slowed, and the shooting had stopped.
“Hold up,” she commanded. “We need to stop and think.”
I was too busy gasping for breath to argue. We sat on a fallen log so thick with moss and soft with decay that it barely supported our weight. A winged horde of mosquitoes and gnats swarmed us immediately.
“OK,” she said, after a break that seemed to hardly have begun. “This way.”
She led us diagonally back towards the river.
“Hey,” I said, when I realized she intended to follow it downstream. She didn’t respond. “Hey. Reyes.”
She stopped, turned, forced a smile to her mud-smeared face. “Lisa. If we’re going to live or die together we might as well operate on a first-name basis.”
“OK. Lisa. What are we doing?”
“Going downstream. I’m sure it’s what they expect, but we don’t have much choice. Upstream is narco territory, and the river’s the only referent we’ve got. If we try to cross the jungle we’ll get lost.” She pointed to the dark clouds already curdling in a corner of the sky. “Rainy season. Thirty minutes from now we won’t know where the sun is, we’ll start going in circles.”
“My phone,” I said. “GPS. We don’t need the sun to navigate.”
She considered. “True. Long as your battery lasts. But where do you want to go? Downstream we’ll eventually find civilization. And it’s where Harrison will look. I promise you he’s on the radio planning a rescue mission already. We just have to hope he finds us before the narcos do.”
“OK, downstream, sure. But this river goes like,” I mimed its wide snaking bends with a finger in the air. “We can follow it a lot faster by going in a straight line between the bends. The narcos,” the word felt strange in my mouth, “might not expect that.”
“Neither will Harrison.”
“They’ll find us as long as they’re looking for my phone signal. And they will be. Sophie will make them.” I felt newly optimistic. Our mutual survival suddenly seemed a whole lot more likely than it had even five minutes ago.
“A straight line in which direction?” Reyes – Lisa – asked. “We’d have to know exactly where the river goes.”
“We do. I have a picture. On my phone.”
It was a photo I had taken from the helicopter. The tin roof of the school was just barely visible, a glittering dot in the corner. The picture was dominated by the river snaking across the verdant carpet of the jungle.
“James Kowalski,” she said, “you’re a genius.”
I smiled with hope and relief. “And I thought I was just being a tourist.”
Chapter 9
We made our way north by northwest, calculating the direction from the sunlight in the picture. I hoped the half-charge on my iPhone would last. I hoped we would be hard to follow. I told myself I wasn’t about to die here in this trackless jungle, a rescue helicopter would be along momentarily, this desperate struggle for survival would soon be reduced to a colourful anecdote.
It was hard work fighting our way through the thick and uneven bush, worse than going uphill over cleared ground. My lungs and limbs soon burned with the effort, while the cuts and scrapes from the broken glass and the river rocks sang a painful symphony across my body, and a vicious headache pounded behind my eyes; but I reminded myself that things could be a lot worse.
I grew thirsty and for half an hour wished desperately for water. Then the clouds opened up, and I wished desperately for the water to go away. The downpour turned the already damp jungle floor into a vast smear of mud and leaves, and we slipped and fell frequently, covering ourselves in muck. Lisa kept my phone and her gun wrapped in her jacket against the rain. I hoped it would be enough.
“Let’s take a break,” she said, when we stumbled across a palm tree with fronds so dense that it acted as a natural umbrella, and I eagerly agreed.
I rested with my back against its rough trunk; Lisa stayed in the rain for a moment to let it wash her face clean before joining me. When she stepped back into relative dryness she gave me an amused look. “You should clean up too. You look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
I shrugged, exhausted. Now that we had stopped my legs were worryingly heavy, and I could feel hotspots that would soon become blisters inside my mud-soaked shoes. “I’d just get dirty again.”
“Well, maybe if they find us you can scare them away.”
We sat in weary silence for a moment.
Then I said, “Remember when you said, ‘don’t worry, you’ll be perfectly safe’?”
She winced. “In retrospect, that might have been a slight exaggeration.”
“You don’t fucking say.”
“You know we were set up.”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“They had
“How could they know we were coming?”
“Anyone might have told them. Whole country’s corrupt. You know there’s a civil war here, against the Marxist guerrillas in the jungle, the FARC.”
“Sure,” I said vaguely.
“Well, the army used to be so useless that all these right-wing paramilitary groups started up, private armies basically, to fight the FARC. But it turned out the cure was even worse than the disease. Massacres, torture, death squads, mass rapes, drug smuggling, name it. The paras got in bed with the narcos, just like the FARC had, and the government got in bed with the paras, because at least they weren’t godless Commies, right? Half the Colombian Congress is under investigation right now for paramilitary links, which is basically a euphemism for taking their drug money. The narcos have this wonderful strategy called
