Maybe when she got back to Guatemala City tonight she would get on the secure scrambled phone line to London. Her father would be amused. He didn’t much care about the art or cultures of non-European people—he referred to them as “our brown brothers,” as though he were a colonist out of Kipling—but a good deal on any commodity was what he lived for.
GUATEMALA
The cannabis plants grew in rows, planted like corn, with the stalks as tall as a man. There were irrigation hoses between rows with holes in them to soak the roots.
Remi sat on the ground and put on the sneakers that Sam had placed in the waterproof bag for her. Then she took two of the pistols from the bag, handed one to Sam, and stuck the other in the waistband of her shorts and pulled her shirt down over it. She said, “I think I know who those men who attacked us were.”
“Me too,” Sam said. “They must patrol the area to be sure outsiders don’t reach the fields.”
“Let’s see if we can call home,” Remi said. She tried her phone, then Sam’s. “The batteries are dead. We’ll have to walk out of here.”
“If the drug farmers let us,” Sam said. “They’re not going to like us any better than the men at the cenote did.”
They heard the sound of an engine. It was distant at first, but it grew louder. After a moment, they could hear squeaking springs as a stake truck bounced along the dusty road between two fields of crops.
Sam and Remi ran into the forest of tall cannabis stalks and moved away from the sounds. They crouched low and watched. The truck bounced up and coasted to a stop, and a middle-aged man in blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a white shirt got out of the passenger side of the cab. He walked one row into the field and selected a marijuana plant. He looked closely at a bud and tested it. He stepped out toward the truck and nodded, and a dozen men jumped from the back of the truck to the ground. They moved along the rows of plants, harvesting the ripe buds.
The harvest proceeded quickly. Sam and Remi had to stay out of sight. When they were sure it was clear, they ran across a gap to the next field. After they had slipped into that field, they heard another engine sound approaching. This time, it was a tractor towing a wagon containing more men, who jumped down and began to harvest the second field.
For hours, Sam and Remi moved from one field of the huge plantation to another, avoiding the harvesters, their trucks and tractors.
The trucks began to pass them again, moving in the other direction. Sam and Remi made their way down a long row of plants in the middle of the field, walking parallel to the roads and maintaining their distance. They came to a forest of bushes, all seven to ten feet tall. “Interesting,” Remi whispered. “They look a lot like a blackthorn, don’t they?”
“Could be,” said Sam. “All I know about the blackthorn is that it’s what the Irish use to make a shillelagh. Also that it looks like a coca tree. And this is a coca tree.” He picked a leaf. “See? You look for two parallel lines on each side of the rib.”
“How do you know about that?”
Sam shrugged and gave Remi a sly smile.
When they reached the end of the coca grove, they could see a single-file line of about twenty trucks and tractors waiting to pull up to barnlike buildings. Sam and Remi kept to the fields as they moved to the side and around the buildings.
Sam pointed at the trucks and whispered, “I think that’s our way out.”
Remi said, “Maybe, but look at all the guards.” Walking the perimeter of the tie-down area were men who carried rifles that looked like AK-47 assault weapons on slings. Sam and Remi could see the curved, thirty-round magazines.
“Interesting,” said Sam. “They’re all facing inward, watching the guys covering the loads of marijuana. They’re not protecting the operation, they’re making sure the farmhands don’t steal any of the product. It’s inventory control.”
Remi said, “Maybe we could just sneak to the road and walk out of here.”
Sam shrugged. “Would the men who tried to kill us in the forest neglect a road?”
“Probably not,” she said. “I guess it’s got to be a truck.”
“Let’s pick one that’s already been loaded, covered, and parked.”
Sam and Remi made a wide circle around the compound, staying among the tall plants and watching the activities in the center. They avoided the spots where a turning truck might sweep its headlights across them, and they stayed far from the buildings where men were hanging, bailing, and loading marijuana.
Sam and Remi stayed under their cover until they were beyond the parked trucks. It looked hopeless. There was a guard standing by the front bumper of the first truck in line, which was fully loaded and tied down. From his tired slouch, he seemed bored. The sling that held his rifle went from his left shoulder across his chest to his right hip, so he would need an extra second or two to bring it around and fire.
Sam and Remi put their heads close, whispered for a few seconds, and then separated and left the woods at the same moment about ten feet apart. They walked silently, but quickly, and converged on the guard from both sides at once with their pistols drawn. The guard turned in Remi’s direction, saw her, and began to tug at his sling to lift it over his head to free his rifle, but Sam was beside the man too quickly and pressed his gun to the man’s head. Remi stepped closer, grasped the sling, and took the rifle away from him. Without warning, Sam hooked his left arm around the man’s neck from behind in a choke hold and held it until he lost consciousness. Sam and Remi each took an ankle and dragged the man into the nearby woods. Sam took the man’s pants and put them on, then put on the man’s straw hat. Remi held the rifle and watched the trucks while Sam took the man’s shirt, tore it, and used it to tie and gag him, then bind him to a tree.
They stepped out of the woods together, Sam holding the AK-47 rifle the way the guards held theirs and wearing the guard’s hat and pants. They walked between two of the already loaded trucks, then picked one, quickly letting their silhouettes be engulfed by the silhouette of the truck. They looked in each direction, trying to see where the other guards were, but couldn’t see any of them from there.
Then, coming along the front of the trucks, was another guard. “Guard,” Sam whispered. Remi crouched beside one of the big truck tires. Sam held the AK-47, his left hand on the forestock and his right just behind the trigger guard, pushed the safety off, and stepped a couple of paces in front of the truck in a bored, slouching posture, his eyes turned in their sockets to watch the guard’s behavior.
The guard kept coming along for a few steps, stopped, then raised his right hand to wave at Sam.
Sam imitated the gesture as exactly as he could, waving back at the man and assuming it meant that he was alert and all was well. He pretended not to be studying the man for his response, just walked a bit closer to the front of the truck and waited. If he was going to have an automatic-weapons fight, he was going to use the truck’s engine as a shield. He took a few breaths and prepared himself. The other guard turned and walked off along the perimeter.
Sam moved back to where Remi waited. They stayed low as they climbed over the gate of the truck to its bed, lifted the rear canvas cover enough to let them crawl under, then pulled it back down to hide. Once under the tarp, they moved some of the marijuana packages to build a cushioning layer beneath them.
Soon they heard footsteps and voices coming to where their truck was parked. Then Sam and Remi felt the truck sink on its springs a little as a man stood on the left step and sat in the driver’s seat, then another came from the right side and sat beside him. The doors of the cab slammed, the engine started, they began to move, and very slowly the truck joined a line of trucks on the gravel road.
Sam listened to the engines for a couple of minutes, then put his head near the canvas. He whispered, “It looks as though five leave at once.” The truck moved up about five lengths and then stopped again.
This time, Remi moved her head close to the bottom of the canvas on the left side. “We’re sitting beside a sign,” she said.
“Can you read it?”
“Estancia Guerrero.”
There was a sudden surge of movement around the truck, on all sides at once. Sam gripped the rifle, and Remi drew her pistol, and they faced away from each other. Men were climbing aboard, sitting on all sides of the canvas behind which Sam and Remi hid. The men laughed and talked, while Sam and Remi, only inches away, held their fire.
The driver shifted into first gear, and the truck moved ahead, gaining rpms, until it was time to shift into second. But, then, they could tell that other trucks were moving too. And by third gear, the workers on both sides had made themselves comfortable, with their legs through the wooden side gates and their backs leaning against the canvas-covered bales of marijuana.
Remi, then Sam, lowered the guns and lay back in uneasy immobility. The trucks kept gaining speed, bouncing along the gravel road, while the men spoke to one another in Spanish, happy that the day had come to an end. After about ten minutes, the truck stopped, and about half the men got off in the center of a small village. The truck drove on again and stopped after another ten minutes, when several others got off near a double row of buildings. Ten minutes later, more workers jumped down to the road.
Sam and Remi listened for another ten minutes or so before they were sure. Remi lifted the canvas slightly and looked out, and Sam lifted the other side. “Everybody off?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Thank goodness. I was afraid I was going to sneeze from the dust.”
“I guess the next thing is to get off the truck and make our way to a town,” he whispered.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “Let’s hope they don’t reach their unloading point before we can bail out.”
They pulled aside the canvas a little and watched the sides of the narrow road while the truck wound its way through heavily forested stretches and up onto plateaus, where, for brief periods, they could see sky above them thick with stars. The distance between trucks had grown greatly during the drive. Now and then, on a curving stretch going up or down a slope, they would see the next truck’s headlights a half mile or more behind them.
Finally, they reached a steep incline where the road wound upward for a long distance. The driver downshifted as the engine labored. Remi darted out over the tailgate and stared ahead, and said, “There’s a town up ahead, at the top of the hill.”
“Then maybe we’d better bail out before we get there,” Sam said. “Get ready to jump.” They got on the right side of the truck and looked out. There was the gravel road heading upward, and, by the side of the road, a covering of low plants and bushes that didn’t seem in the dark to be woody enough to be dangerous. They moved close to the back of the truck to be ready. The road turned, so the truck slowed, and the driver needed to be looking ahead, and Sam said, “Now.”
Remi jumped and rolled, and Sam jumped after her. They scrambled off the dusty road into the bushes, and watched the truck bounce and rumble upward away from them. At the top of the hill, they could see a church, with a pair of short, square-sided steeples on the front. When the truck reached that point, it seemed to level and disappear.
Sam and Remi stood up and began to climb. She looked down. “Your leg—is that blood?” She bent and looked closer.
He looked too. “I guess it is. I must have scraped it on something when I hit. I’m all right.”
They walked up the last few feet of the hill and around to the other side of the church and sat in the moonlight to look at Sam’s leg. The blood streak went from his knee to his ankle, but it was already drying. “No harm done,” he said.
They kept to the side of the church, sat down in the dark shadows by it, and watched the second truck make its way up to the level of the church, where the town’s main street began. The truck traveled along the street without slowing. At the end of the block of closed shops and restaurants, the road curved a little and went downward, and the truck disappeared.
Sam and Remi stayed at the back of the church building and waited while the other trucks climbed the road and passed through the town, one by one. Their small convoy had consisted of five trucks, but the Fargos stayed where they were as long as they could see headlights in the distance. They counted twenty trucks before the road was clear again. It was nearly dawn when they walked out of their hiding place and saw that there were people in some of the shops already. They passed a baker’s shop, where a man was firing up a big wood-burning oven behind the building. There were people in the yards outside their houses, gathering eggs, feeding chickens, starting fires.
Sam said, “I’m hungry.”
“Me too. Did any of our Guatemalan Quetzales survive our swim?”
“I think so. I’ll look in the bag.” He opened the waterproof bag, shuffled around in it, and found his wallet. “That’s good news. My wallet survived.” He looked inside. “The money too. Let’s see if we can buy some breakfast.”
They walked toward the shop where the man was stoking the oven and saw two men heading for the same place. One wore a wrinkled seersucker suit and the other a priest’s black coat and collar. They strolled down the center of the street, chatting in a friendly way, as they approached the little restaurant.
They and the host had a quick exchange of greetings, and then the priest turned to the Fargos and said in English, “Good morning. My name is Father Gomez. And this is Dr. Carlos Huerta, our town physician.”
Sam shook their hands. “Sam Fargo. And this is my wife, Remi.”
“So,” she said, “the parish priest and the doctor together at dawn. I hope nobody has died during the night.”
“No,” said the priest. “A baby was born a while ago. The family sent for me to baptize the little boy immediately, so we thought we might as well begin the day here. Miguel Alvarez saw us coming. And to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”
“We were hiking and camping north of Cobán and we seem to have wandered a bit and gotten lost,” said Sam. “We had to abandon most of our gear. But we found our way to a road, and here we are, safe and in a town.”
“Yes, you are,” said Dr. Huerta. “Will you join us for breakfast?”
“We would be delighted,” said Remi.
They talked while the restaurateur’s wife and two of his sons arrived and began to cook. They produced a feast of thick, handmade tortillas, rice, black beans, fried eggs, papaya, slices of cheese, and sautéed plantains.
After a few remarks about the area, the climate, and the people, Father Gomez said, “You came from that way, beyond the church?”
“Yes,” said Remi.
“Did you stop at the Estancia Guerrero?”
Remi was uncomfortable. “It didn’t look to us like a friendly place.”
The priest and the doctor exchanged a meaningful look. Dr. Huerta said, “Your instincts served you well.”
Sam looked at Remi, then said, “I’m afraid we got a pretty good look at part of the place. The reason we had to abandon our gear was that some men were trying to shoot us.”
“This isn’t the only story like that I’ve heard,” said Father Gomez. “It’s a disgrace.”
Dr. Huerta said, “Father Gomez and I have been trying to do something about it for a year or more. First, we wrote to the woman who owns the Estancia, an Englishwoman named Sarah Allersby. We thought she would want to know that a part of her huge property was being used as a drug plantation.”
Sam and Remi exchanged a look. “What did she say?” asked Sam.
“Nothing. The response came from the regional police, who told us we didn’t know marijuana from sugarcane and were wasting everyone’s time.”
Remi said, “Do you know Miss Allersby?”
“No, we’ve never seen her,” said the priest. “But who ca
n tell what she knows, far away in Guatemala City, or in London, or New York?”
The doctor said, “Meanwhile, heavily armed men roam the forests, and trucks full of drugs come through town every few nights. Lots of the villages around here have young men who work there. Some come home, others don’t. Are they all right? Who knows?”
“I’m sorry,” said Remi. “Maybe we can talk to the authorities in Guatemala City and pass on the story. Sometimes outsiders can seem more objective to the police.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Dr. Huerta. “If the drug people saw you and shot at you, they might be searching for you even now. Just to be safe, we ought to get you out of here. I’ve got a car and I’ll be driving to the next town this morning. I’ll take you with me and put you on a bus to Guatemala City.”
“Thank you,” Sam said. “We would appreciate it very much.”
“Yes, we would,” said Remi. “Doesn’t the bus stop here?”
“Not anymore,” said the priest. “Santa Maria de los Montañas isn’t big enough. There are only two hundred souls, and few have any business elsewhere.”
Dr. Huerta said, “Let’s give it another half hour, just to be sure the drug trucks have passed, before we get on the road.”
“While you’re waiting, I’ll show you our church,” said Father Gomez. “It was made by the first generation of converts in the sixteenth century, under the direction of the Dominicans.”
“We’d love to see it,” Remi said.
They walked to the church with the priest. The front had a pair of low bell towers with a flat façade between them. There was a large pair of wooden doors, opening on a little plaza that ended at the road. It occurred to Remi that the style was similar to some of the smaller California missions. Inside were carved statues of Mary and baby Jesus above the altar, flanked by angels with shields and spears.
“The statues were imported from Spain in the eighteenth century,” said Father Gomez. “These pews were made by parishioners about that time.” He sat in the front row and the Fargos joined him. “And now all that history culminates in the town turning into a drug traffickers’ paradise.”