It was 20 August. A man descended from the Dutch KLM airliner straight in from Curaçao to Paramaribo airport. It was not Professor Medvers Watson, for whom a reception committee waited further down the coast.
It was not even the US diplomat, Ronald Proctor, for whom a crate waited at the docks.
It was the British resort-developer, Henry Nash. With his Amsterdam-delivered visa he passed effortlessly through customs and immigration and took a taxi into town. It would have been tempting to book in at the Torarica, far and away the best in town. But he might have met real Britishers there, so he went to the Krasnopolsky on the Dominiestraat.
His room was top floor, with a balcony facing east. The sun was behind him when he went out for a look over the city. The extra height gave a hint of breeze to make the dusk bearable. Far to the east, seventy miles away and over the river, the jungles of San Martin were waiting.
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Jungle
It was the American diplomat, Ronald Proctor, who leased the car. It was not even from an established agency but from a private seller advertising in the local paper.
The Cherokee was second-hand but in good repair, and with a bit of work and a thorough service, which its US-army-trained new owner intended to give it, it would do what it had to.
The deal he made the vendor was simple and sweet. He would pay ten thousand dollars in cash. He would only need the vehicle for a month, until his own 4x4 came through from the States. If he returned it absolutely intact in thirty days, the vendor would take it back and reimburse five thousand dollars.
The seller was looking at an effort-free five thousand dollars in a month. Given that the man facing him was a charming American diplomat, and the Cherokee might come back in thirty days, it seemed foolish to go through all the trouble of changing the documents. Why alert the taxman?
Proctor also rented the lock-up garage and store shed behind the flower and produce market. Finally he went to the docks and signed for his single crate, which went into the garage to be carefully unpacked and repacked in two canvas kitbags. Then Ronald Proctor simply ceased to exist.
In Washington, Paul Devereaux was gnawed by anxiety and curiosity as the days dragged by. Where was this man? Had he used his visa and entered Surinam? Was he on his way?
The easy way to indulge the temptation would be to ask the Surinam authorities direct, via the US embassy on Redmondstraat. But that would trigger Surinamese curiosity. They would want to know why. They would pick him up themselves and start asking questions. The man called Avenger could arrange to be set free and start again. The Serb, already becoming paranoid at the thought of going to Peshawar, could panic and call the deal off. So Devereaux paced and prowled and waited.
Down in Paramaribo the tiny consulate of San Martin had been tipped off by Colonel Moreno that an American pretending to be a collector of butterflies might apply for a visa. It was to be granted immediately, and he was to be informed at once.
But no one called Medvers Watson appeared. The man they sought was sitting at a terrace café in the middle of Parbo with his last purchases in a sack beside him. It was 24 August.
What he had bought had come from the town’s only camping and hunting shop, the Tackle Box on Zwarten Hovenbrug Street. As the London businessman Mr Henry Nash he had brought almost nothing that would be useful across the border. But with the contents of the diplomat’s crate and what he had acquired that morning, he could think of nothing he might be missing. So he tilted back his Parbo beer and enjoyed the last he was going to have for some time.
Those who waited were rewarded on the morning of the 25th. The queue at the river crossing was, as ever, slow, and the mosquitoes, as ever, dense. Those crossing were almost entirely locals, with pedal bikes, motorcycles and rusty pickups, all loaded with produce.
There was only one smart car in the queue on the Surinam side, a black Cherokee, with a white man at the wheel. He wore a creased seersucker jacket in cream, off-white Panama hat and heavy-rimmed glasses. Like the others he sat and swatted, then moved a few yards forwards as the chain ferry took on a fresh cargo and cranked back across the Commini.
After an hour he was at last on the flat iron deck of the ferry, handbrake on, able to step down and watch the river. On the San Martin side he joined the queue of six cars awaiting clearance.
The San Martin checkpoint was tighter and there seemed to be a tension among the dozen guards who milled around. The road was blocked by a striped pole laid over two recently added oil drums weighted with concrete.
In the shed to one side, an immigration officer studied all papers, his head visible through the window. The Surinamese, here to visit relatives or buy produce to sell back in Parbo, must have wondered why, but patience has never been rationed in the Third World, nor information a glut. They sat and waited again. It was almost dusk when the Cherokee rolled to the barrier. A soldier flicked his fingers for the needed passport, took it from the American and handed it through the window.
The off-road driver seemed nervous. He sweated in rivers. He made no eye contact, but stared ahead. From time to time he glanced sideways through the booth window. It was during one of these glances that he saw the immigration officer start violently and grab his phone. That was when the traveller with the wispy goatee beard panicked.
The engine suddenly roared, the clutch was let in. The heavy black 4x4 threw itself forward, knocked a soldier flying with the wing-mirror, tossed the striped pole in the air and burst through, swerving crazily round the trucks ahead and charging off into the dusk.
Behind the Cherokee there was chaos. Part of the flying pole had whacked the army officer in the face. The immigration official came shouting out of his booth waving an American passport in the name of Professor Medvers Watson.
Two of Colonel Moreno’s secret police goons, who had been standing behind the immigration officer in the shed, came running out with handguns drawn. One went back and began to gabble down the phone lines to the capital forty miles east.
Galvanized by the army officer clutching his broken nose, the dozen soldiers piled into the olive-drab truck and set off in pursuit. The secret policemen ran to their own blue Land Rover and did the same. But the Cherokee was round two corners and gone.
In Langley, Kevin McBride saw the flickering bulb flash on the desk phone that only linked him to the office of Colonel Moreno in San Martin City.
He took the call, listened carefully, noted what was said, asked a few questions and noted again. Then he went to see Paul Devereaux.
‘They’ve got him,’ he said.
‘In custody?’
‘Almost. He tried to come in as I thought, over the river from Surinam. He must have spotted the sudden interest in his passport, or the guards made too much of a fuss. Whatever, he smashed down the barrier and roared off. Colonel Moreno says there is nowhere for him to go. Jungle both sides, patrols on the roads. He says they’ll have him by morning.’
‘Poor man,’ said Devereaux. ‘He really should have stayed at home.’
Colonel Moreno was overly optimistic. It took two days. In fact, the news was brought by a bush farmer who lived two miles up a track running off the right-hand side of the highway into the jungle.
He said he recalled the noise of a heavy engine growling past his homestead the previous evening and his wife had caught sight of a big and almost new off-road going up the track.
He naturally presumed it must be a government vehicle, since no farmer or trapper would dream of being able to afford such a vehicle. Only when it did not come back by the following night did he trudge down to the main road. There he found a patrol and told them.
The soldiers found the Cherokee. It had made one further mile beyond the farmer’s shack when, trying to push onwards into the rain forest, it had nosed into a gully and stuck at forty-five degrees. Deep furrows showed where the fleeing driver had tried to force his way out of the gully, but his panic had merely made matt
ers worse. It took a crane truck from the city to get the 4x4 out of the hole, turned around and heading for the road.
Colonel Moreno himself came. He surveyed the churned earth, the shattered saplings and torn vines.
‘Trackers,’ he said. ‘Get the dogs. The Cherokee and everything in it to my office. Now.’
But darkness came down; the trackers were simple folk, not able to face the darkness when the spirits of the forest were abroad. They began next morning at dawn and found the quarry by noon.
One of Moreno’s men was with them and had a cellphone. Moreno took the call in his office. Thirty minutes later Kevin McBride walked into Devereaux’s office.
‘They found him. He’s dead.’
Devereaux glanced at his desk calendar. It revealed the date was 27 August.
‘I think you should be there,’ he said.
McBride groaned.
‘It’s a hell of a journey, Paul. All over the bloody Caribbean.’
‘I’ll sanction a company plane. You should be there by the breakfast hour tomorrow. It’s not just I who have to be satisfied this damn business is over for good. Zilic has to believe it too. Go down there, Kevin. Convince us both.’
The man Langley knew only by his code name of Avenger had spotted the track off the main road when he flew over the region in the Piper. It was one of a dozen that left the highway between the river and the capital forty miles to the east. Each track serviced one or two small plantations or farms, then petered out into nothing.
He had not thought to photograph them at the time, saving all his film for the hacienda at El Punto. But he remembered them. And on the flight back with the doomed charter pilot Lawrence he had seen them again.
The one he chose to use was the third from the river. He had a start of half a mile over his pursuers when he slowed in order not to leave visible skid marks, and eased the Cherokee up the track. Round a bend, engine off, he heard the pursuers thunder past.
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 towards the river bank.
He reached the Commini at dawn, well upstream of the crossing point and ferry. The inflatable air-bed would not have been his crossing of choice but it sufficed. Prone on the navy-blue canvas, he paddled with both hands, withdrawing them from the water when a deadly cottonmouth 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 Surinam bank. The trusty air-bed was stabbed into oblivion and abandoned. It was mid-morning 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 lock-up 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 USA 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-heaven airbase 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 whisky.
‘I guess a tad early for me, colonel,’ said McBride.
‘Nonsense, my friend, never too early for a toast. Come . . . I 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. Round 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, water-purification tablets.
Table Two had a tent, pegs, lantern, canvas basin on a tripod, 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 kit, he also abandoned this. Too heavy, perhaps.’
At Table Three the colonel whisked a sheet off the contents. It was a Remington Three-Double-O-Six, 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 eighty per cent 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 metres 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.
‘We? 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 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 raccoon 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.
‘I know about fire ants. Nature’s most fantastic cleaners. Fifty yards from the remains we found the ants’ nest. They leave 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 it might be; he fancied a second whisky.
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 maybe this is even better. He had to abandon it at the border-crossing point when he was recognized.’