Reverb
Ten: Complex-Compound
- x -
The envelope didn't look all that impressive, lying on the coffee table in Pete's hotel suite: an ordinary manila documents folder, thick but not bulging, held shut with red string. The envelope was crumpled and creased, the paper was grubby and the edges had become worn and tattered. There was a faint stain of something, probably machine oil, darkening one corner. Dr. Urteaga had stashed the folder in his untidy garage for several days, until he'd grown too nervous to let it out of his sight.
He was still too agitated now to settle down, and paced aimlessly around the room. He was a miserable sight: dark circles underneath bloodshot eyes, a constant tic on one cheek, the sagging look of a face that had recently lost flesh. He had flinched noticeably when he'd been ushered in, looking from Pete to Sam in alarm. "Perdón, Señor Thornton – I - I thought we would be alone . . . "
Sam thought it must take a special kind of jumpy to mistake him for hired muscle. He tried to think of it as a kind of backhanded compliment, but it didn't work. Instead, he heeded Pete's nod – he hardly even needed the signal – and removed himself from the room, joining Michael Thornton and Raquella in the hallway, leaving only Pilar to go over the documents with Pete while Jorge Urteaga twitched and climbed the walls.
Michael gave Sam a sympathetic look. "Sorry about that . . . I didn't think he'd actually kick you out."
Sam shrugged. "Your dad's got that new toy to play with, and it wouldn't take much to make Jorge-Porge run away again. The poor guy's scared of his own shadow." The helicopter pilot who'd flown the Phoenix chopper in from Lima had brought Pete a present straight from Willis' laboratory, a new gizmo for reading documents. It involved focussed lights and a set of adjustable magnifying lenses, and Sam hoped it wouldn't mean even worse eyestrain.
"Do not blame him," Raquella said earnestly. "His own shadow could hide his murderer."
"Michael – " Sam hesitated, then pushed forward. "Are you okay about all this? Me workin' with your dad like this, I mean." Instead of you. There, he'd asked.
Michael blinked with surprise. "Um, yeah. It's fine." He shrugged. "I can't, after all. And – well, you're going back to the States after this. And I'm not. You know that." He picked up Raquella's hand and interlaced his fingers with hers, grasping tightly.
"Then would you please tell him soon, okay? It's getting real awkward. You're not scared of him, are you?"
Raquella looked at Sam in surprise, then rounded on Michael. "What? Your own father, and you haven't spoken to him yet?"
Michael looked sheepish. "I will, cara. Soon. Te prometo."
"You had better! It will not be good if I have to ask your father for your hand."
- x -
Pete's hands were steady and his movements precise as he set each document under the magnifying viewer and skimmed through the contents, occasionally asking Pilar for help in translation. "Yeah. Oh, yeah. This could raise one hell of a stink . . . so, Dr. Urteaga. Your patient – "
"Guillermino Valdivieso Riquelme."
"Um, yeah. He brought you the packet and asked you to hide it, and turn it over to the authorities if anything happened to him. Two days later, his body was found floating in the Huallaga, with half a dozen bullet holes in him." And you didn't go to the authorities. Instead, you dragged Pilar into it, got her kidnapped and nearly got her killed. Pete's hands didn't shake even though his buried rage was approaching the volcanic. He couldn't afford blind fury on top of the literal blindness. "You were – " a pathetic coward – "uncertain who to approach, so you contacted Dr. Velasquez and asked for her advice." He glanced dourly at Pilar. "You should have called me at that point, not gone haring off on your own, asking questions and drawing attention to yourself."
Pilar met his eyes steadily but sorrowfully. "I know, Peter. And I am sorry. If I had known that Guillermino's brother worked for Señora Rojas, I would never have been so careless."
Pete examined the next document, a fax from the Cayman Islands confirming a transfer of offshore funds that made his eyebrows twitch. Urteaga hadn't shown the entire packet to Pilar – he hadn't even dared to look at more than the top few items in the bundle. Ignorance isn't bliss, it's suicide. "I'm betting that the brother – "
"Ezequiel."
"I'll bet that Ezequiel intended plain ordinary blackmail . . . or maybe he hoped to leverage himself into a higher position in Señora Rojas' organisation. Whatever he intended, he didn't play his cards very well. Are you sure it was Rojas' men who killed him?"
"For that, we can only guess," Pilar answered. She was looking over a transcript of one side of a particularly candid telephone conversation, frowning at the bad handwriting and the casual obscenities peppering the page. "The body had been badly mutilated, and most of the damage was inflicted ante-mortem; with that much torture, I am sure they had all Ezequiel's secrets from him by the time they finally killed him. The corpse was left beside a well-travelled road, with a placard beside it – the usual sentiments: Death to Traitors, Long Live Chairman Gonzalo. It was signed 'Sendero Luminoso'."
"But you're certain it wasn't Shining Path."
"The Partido Comunista Peruano always signs its notices with its initials – PCP. Never 'Sendero'. And I am quite certain that every senderista knows how to spell 'Gonzalo' correctly. No. In such a case, it is usually assumed that the murder was done by the Army."
"It probably was." Pete's face was grim as he studied another document. "That damned woman's got more irons in the fire – " his mind shied violently away from where that image led. "She's got a piece of the Army in one pocket, part of the government in another, and half a dozen chunks of the global organised crime network up her sleeve." He set his jaw as he picked up the next item in the stack, a massive order for a list of chemicals that Pete recognised: they were used in the processing of coca leaf.
He had to keep his mind clear, to absorb the details of the situation so he could make decisions, plan effectively, think strategically. Much as he would have liked to round up his troops and storm the castle – or at least drop in on Hacienda Sandoval with lots of firepower and a few direct questions – it was information that added up to real leverage. Never mind that the Peruvian back country had swallowed MacGyver without a trace; never mind that the odds of Mac's survival plunged farther with each grim day that passed. This packet of documents might hold the answer to where MacGyver was, and why he hadn't returned. Pete had to find out.
And if these documents had killed his best friend . . . well, he'd find that out, too.
- x -
The wrist bone's connected to the arm bone, the arm bone's connected to the shoulder bone . . .
MacGyver eased his left arm in the sling that Diego had helped him rig. There wasn't much they could do about the pain – although he had his doubts about just what was in the bitter, astringent tea Xavier kept bringing him to drink – but the sling did make him more comfortable as he worked. For now.
He knew what that evil red line creeping up his arm meant, of course. Topical infection's connected to bacteremia, bacteremia's connected to lymphangitis, lymphangitis is connected to septicemia . . . and so on. How far from real medical care were they, anyway? Even if Terco would let him leave, let him try to get help, risk letting him slip out of the death-grasp of Shining Path . . . once this long, hot, strange day was over, maybe he'd ask. Assuming he didn't muddle the ingredients in his current chemistry set and blow himself to pieces. Or say the wrong thing and provoke the increasing agitated guerrilla commander into shooting him.
It was surprising, how quickly his status in the Shining Path cadre had changed. Somehow, he'd jumped from the bottom of the pecking order very nearly to the top. When food appeared, it wasn't any more plentiful than before, but it was presented with no sense of mockery or grudging reluctance. And when Pablo had brought Mac his shirt, it had been sluiced out in the river and was almost clean, still slightly damp and badly wrinkled. Putting it on had cooled the fever-heat for a few minutes, and helped his head clear. He needed it clear.
They've been growin' coca in Peru for, oh, about a thousand years at least. It's not illegal there – it's part of the culture. There's a mild buzz you get when you chew the leaves – okay, yeah, I tried it on my first visit. It's real effective against altitude sickness. Really burns the mouth, though. I didn't like it.
They don't process it into cocaine here. They never have. There's a whole labyrinth of raw pits and ramshackle sheds near the plantations where the coca leaf is turned into a kind of paste – then the paste is flown out of the country, mostly to Colombia, where they do the final processing and turn it into refined powdered death.
Another useful thing about Mac's change of status – when he told the guerrillas he needed something, he got it. Where they were getting some of the stuff, he didn't know and figured it was better not to ask. The chemicals must have been stolen from one of the processing compounds, of course. As for the rest of it – Jefe, a tall young man who always seemed to be woolgathering and was never allowed to stand a watch, turned out to be one of the finest scrounges Mac had ever met. He'd been coming and going steadily since before dawn, and was responsible for the hacksaw and the tinsnips, the sandpaper, the screw-top jars and the sackful of empty IncaKola soda bottles, the pieces of plastic piping, and most of the collection of odd pieces of metal that Mac was currently sorting through. Copper and brass wouldn't work at all, steel was out; tin would do and aluminum was best of all. Just where the heck did Jefe find a speed fairing from a Cessna? Better not ask. Better not even wonder.
"Okay, Diego. What we really need is metal shavings – " he wasn't sure he had the right word, and held up an imaginary pinch to show how small he meant. "Like you get if you – " he couldn't think of the Spanish word for 'drill', and doubted he'd ever heard it anyway. Basic Spanish really didn't cover the kind of things he usually needed to say. He looked over at Xavier.
"Drill a hole?"
"Taladrar un agujero."
"Gracias." Mac turned back to where Diego was waiting patiently – a day ago, Mac would have sworn he had about as much patience as a grenade. "Like you get if you drill a hole. Do your best and get the pieces as small as you can. Fill each jar up to here." He held up one of the glass jars and pointed to a level most of the way up.
"How many do you need?"
"We've got six of these jars. I would like to use them all."
The guerrilla smiled, his teeth broken and crooked in his sunken face. "The more we have, the more La Roja weeps and curses tomorrow?"
"You got it." Mac turned to the row of plastic jugs and buckets Diego and Amaro had brought him from the chemical stores of the processing sheds, mentally sorting out which was which. He was pretty sure they'd pulled their raid on one of the smaller satellite operations, leaving the big complex belonging to Esperanza Rojas undisturbed – for now. He was pretty sure they hadn't killed anyone in the raid. He had to make himself be content with that.
Even making the base coca paste involves a bunch of nasty chemicals. And it's not like they're all that careful with them. When they sluice off the stuff – which happens a couple of times in the process, with different combinations of poisons – it just runs downhill, into the watershed. The Huallaga's connected to the Marañón, the Marañón's connected to the Amazon . . .
My first visit to the Huallaga valley, I remember seeing folks with a stumbling, almost spastic way of walking – when I saw their faces, I realised it was manganese poisoning. It damages the central nervous system, and leaves this fixed expression on the victims' faces, like they can't look any more to see what's being done to them.
And then there's the others – mostly men, old before their time, skinny and bent like twisted alpine trees, with reddened eyes and patchy skin and coughs that never go away. That's from the kerosene in the processing pits, the pozos. The green leaves get dumped into the pozos, with water and sodium carbonate and kerosene poured on top, and then pounded. If the pozo is big enough, they just climb into the pit and stomp. The fumes from the kerosene climb up into their skin and eyes and lungs. Labour's real cheap out there. Life's even cheaper.
"Now, this stuff won't explode, but you have to be careful. Make sure your hands are dry before you touch it, and wash them well afterwards." Pablo nodded earnestly, his dark eyes round as he studied the metal can half-full of fine white crystals that Mac had handed him. "Don't let any get in your mouth, you got that? You'll know if you do – it doesn't have much of a flavour, but it's very sweet. You'll notice it right away."
"Is it poison?"
MacGyver laid his good hand on the boy's shoulder reassuringly. "Better not take any chances. Just be careful." He handed Julio the worn white cotton T-shirt and the sheaf of scrap paper that Jefe had found for him, and waved the two boys away. "Get busy, now."
He'd been aware all along of Xavier's keen eyes watching him, studying and absorbing everything he was doing. When he turned his head, he saw the sardonic smile and knew he was busted.
Xavier spoke quietly, in English. "Very slick. You never told him even one little lie."
"Well, I coulda told him that it's a slow poison."
The guerrilla grinned. "Is there a reason you're not telling him it's ordinary white sugar?"
Mac didn't answer. Xavier's degree had been in biology, not chemistry, and he'd hoped that would help shield him from discovery. Guess not.
Xavier's face settled back into a noncommittal mask, his blank expression showing nothing of his thoughts. He'd looked like that for most of the day. "True, if you let anyone learn just what you are doing, and how, then they could do it again somewhere else." He shrugged. "These chemicals are very common. They are easy to steal."
"Maybe I don't wanna be remembered as the gringo who taught you guys a whole buncha new ways to kill people."
"Nothing is remembered here, my friend." Xavier's eyelids half shuttered, hiding his gaze. "There is no yesterday for us. No tomorrow, either. Not any more."
The worst part is that the farmers don't really want to have anything to do with it. They'd rather not grow the coca at all. The crop's easy to grow, and it brings in good money. But they don't like it.
They don't really care about what the stuff does to unimaginable strangers in faraway countries – they figure nobody there cares about them, after all, and they've got their own troubles. But right here at home, along with the money, the coca brings hard-eyed men with dead eyes and twitchy trigger fingers. It brings violence and corruption and death. The growers would rather grow just about anything else, but they get shot if they try. Or worse.
That was the project Phoenix was working on when we got chased out of the country a few years back – working with the farmers on alternative crops, setting up transport so they could get it to market, making sure they had a place to sell it for enough to live on. Then the government reneged on its pledge to help them, and our people were butchered by Shining Path. It just about killed Pete to have to give up.
- x -
The usual morning mists had burned away and the day was getting hot, and most of the guerrillas who weren't actively helping him had found patches of shade for siesta. Mac shucked out of his shirt again, easing it off from underneath the sling. His arm throbbed. Xavier brought him a chipped mug with yet another decoction and glared at him until he drank the entire thing. This one was even more bitter than the others had been, but by the time he'd finished it, he felt a bit better, and the angry sense of intractable thirst had eased.
He'd noticed a tremor in his hands the day before; it was still there today, and getting worse. There was nothing for it but to ask Xavier to pick out a couple of men with steady eyes and hands, and resign himself to handing off another task.
There was a familiarity to all this – working with an ad-hoc team, unskilled but enthusiastic: some perplexed, some curious, some skeptical, some only interested in results. His mind, scampering in a dozen directions at once, casting about wildly and peering into every cranny, lining up and sorting through the possibilities. The biggest challenges never stymied those scrambling, excited innovative reflexes: the broader and more impossible the task, the more ways he could find of approaching it. Especially when there were other people around, people willing to help instead of just stand around and gape in confusion. Even though the helpers tended to gape too, all the way through.
Only this time was completely different. No casual teaching here, no peppering his instructions with comments about the laws of physics, or the reliability of chemical reactions. No private glow of joy at the elegant, infinitely flexible pragmatism of science. Instead, he was doing anything and everything he could to hide the simplicity and confuse the details, to make the straightforward processes seem elaborate and intimidating. Reproducibility of results is the backbone of the progressive advancement of overall knowledge via the experimental method . . . MacGyver could hear the dry, precise voice in his memory, but couldn't remember which professor it had been. A boring one.
He'd had them bring him a supply of every chemical from the processing stores, including machine oil and cleaning solvents, even though he wasn't planning on using the ammonium hydroxide at all, and the sodium carbonate was fairly stable, although he could think of a few fun tricks even with that. Before he'd given Diego's crew the task of rendering the selected pieces of aluminum scrap down into shavings, he'd made a show out of picking through the hodgepodge collection Jefe had assembled, testing various items with a length of steel pipe he'd magnetised, making the selection look much more complicated than it actually was.
Mac glanced up as Xavier returned, and swallowed hard. Here was another difference. One of the two men with him, Sinchi, was an Asháninka Indian. There were three in the senderista band; Mac had no idea if they were there willingly or not. Sinchi was short and compactly built, and his coal-black eyes revealed nothing. Mac wasn't sure he even spoke Spanish.
The other man, Raoul, Mac knew far too well. When he'd made his best attempt at escaping, four days after the guerrillas had found him on the mountain ledge – well before he'd given Xavier that promise – he'd been handed over to Raoul afterwards. The man had a steady eye and hand, all right: he'd been methodical and vicious, and clearly angry and disappointed at the order not to inflict permanent crippling damage.
Mac took a deep breath and told himself that his ribs really didn't still hurt from the beating. It had been – how long? A week, two weeks? He wasn't sure. Only faint greenish smears remained of the massive dark bruises, and the black eye and split lip were gone, leaving only the memory. The memory wasn't nearly faded enough.
There was nothing for it: he handed Raoul and Sinchi the big plastic jug of hydrochloric acid and Jefe's sack of empty IncaKola soda bottles, and explained how much liquid he needed in each bottle and how to seal them afterwards.
"Find a place to work where there's a breeze to carry off the fumes," he instructed. "This is nasty stuff."
Raoul held up the jug and studied it, a nonchalant smirk on his face. "Sí. Very . . . 'nasty stuff', as you say. The base coca paste has to be dissolved in dilute hydrochloric or sulfuric acid in the second phase of processing, so that the potassium permanganate can be added to force precipitation of the unwanted alkaloids." He met MacGyver's eyes and bared his teeth in a mirthless, carnivorous grin. Mac felt his stomach curdle. So much for foolin' anyone.
"Fun and games." Raoul hefted the jug. "If it were up to me, I'd grab a few of the traquateros and simply pour the acid over their fucking heads. That would send a good message. Very clear."
He stalked away, Sinchi ghosting along in his wake.
MacGyver's heart was racing as if he'd been running a marathon, but the sweltering day suddenly seemed icy. He gripped the edge of the rough worktable they'd set up for him, trying to force the shaking to stop, feeling a splinter from the mangy wood digging into his palm. He was shivering as if an arctic breeze had slammed into him.
There were almost too many possibilities, too many choices. MacGyver looked at the collection of chemicals in front of him. I could just about grab any two at random, dump 'em in the same container, and get a reaction. If it didn't burn or sizzle or explode, it'd release toxic gases.
When I was a kid, one shining Christmas my dad gave me my very first chemistry set. I can't remember anything else that happened that whole winter; the only thing that mattered in the whole world was that Mister Einstein Little Chemical Laboratory – okay, really it was a Lionel-Porter Chemcraft set, but that's not what my mom called it. Especially when I started out, Christmas afternoon, by immediately blowing up a perfectly harmless shoebox.
My grandpa didn't say much about the bangs and flashes, just, "Careful, Bud. It's a lot easier to knock things down than to build 'em up again." But a couple weeks later, in the middle of a lesson on fly-tying, he told me all about dynamiting fish. In gruesome detail. I got the message.
Harry was right, of course. It's funny how I ended up spending way more time learning how to keep things from going boom – bomb disposal is all about taking apart the puzzles, seeing where someone's urge to destroy is going, and stopping them from getting there. I didn't like the military and I didn't like Viet Nam, but I loved the work and the challenge and the feeling that I could save lives by thinking my way to safety – safety for me, my buddies, and whole villages of innocent people.
Creation oughta be easier than destruction. How come it's harder?
"I mean it, Terco. You want to really hit La Roja where it hurts? We'll take out the pozos, the sheds, the storage facilities, the works. She won't know what hit her. And she won't be able to bounce back, not with the mess we'll make. But you've got to get all the people out of the processing area. No killing, you got that? Sin matando. Comprendes?"
Terco met his look stolidly. Mac braced himself for another round of roaring, another attempt to overwhelm him through sheer volume and implacable anger.
Instead, Terco nodded, a single chop of his head. "Sí."
"What?"
"There will be nobody in the pozos." Terco turned his back on MacGyver and strode away.
Mac watched him stride away. He felt oddly deflated.
"That was too easy."
"You can trust him, amigo. This time. He has no wish to kill the farmers or the workers." Xavier's mouth quirked with a trace of a smile. "Five years ago, Amaro was with a column who forced the traquateros to agree to pay the coca farmers a higher price for the leaf." Xavier gave Mac a sidelong look, as if he expected to be met with scoffing disbelief, but Mac only nodded. He'd heard about it before – Shining Path had gained the loyalty of much of the coca region by supporting the farmers against the traquateros, the smugglers – mostly Colombians – who ruled the coca trade and called the shots. The honeymoon had ended in the ever-escalating cycles of senseless violence.
"Of course, as soon as Chairman Gonzalo was arrested, they broke their word." Xavier smiled cynically. "So now Terco will call a tribunal and remind them of their broken promises. Every farmer for miles around will be there, and every worker in the pozos. Whether they wish to come or not."
Mac swallowed. "Is he gonna kill them? The traquateros?"
Xavier shook his head – not in reassurance but uncertainty. "I do not know. I have known Terco for years, but I do not know him any more." He watched MacGyver eased his arm in its sling and turned back to his chemistry set. "He means to break you."
"He might not have enough time." Mac wrestled with the lid on a plastic tub of potassium permanganate.
Xavier's eyes narrowed as he watched Mac measure out the dark purple crystals. "Amigo, you should rest."
"In a bit."
The guerrilla had been squatting comfortably in the shade; now he rose, drew close, leaned over Mac's worktable. His voice was soft enough to be almost lost under the chatter of birdcalls from the forest. "Maq'. What are you planning now?"
MacGyver hesitated, biting his lip, then showed him the project he'd been quietly working on since the first load of supplies had arrived in the early morning. At the bottom of each permanganate container had been a small deposit of purple residue – permanganate powder. He'd been adding to it all morning, carefully grinding small amounts of the chemical crystals to dust.
Xavier nodded thoughtfully as Mac explained, the fingers of his good hand flicking in the air as he described what he had in mind.
"You are sure this will work?"
"Nope."
For the first time all day, Xavier's mask cracked. The grin was warm and genuine, although his words were sobering. "Terco won't like it. He still doesn't trust you – he won't let you anywhere near the place." The bright grin clicked off into solemnity.
Mac met his eyes levelly. "I wasn't planning on tellin' him till afterwards."
The eyebrows climbed. "Afterwards? There will be an afterwards?"
"Well, yeah." Mac's eyes narrowed. "What, were you thinking I was gonna blow myself up? Or bolt?"
Xavier nodded. "No, no. I should know you will not. You cannot." He watched as Mac examined a fresh sheet of sandpaper for contamination, and carefully began to crush a small supply of the purple crystals.
Mac's fingers moved slowly and delicately, and not just because the stuff was tricky to work with. It wasn't only the permanganate that might explode at any moment.
"So. What can I do to help?"
Mac's hand stilled and his eyes flicked up to Xavier's. A slow smile spread over his face. He still felt weak and drained and stretched to the cracking point, but the air had grown suddenly fresher and easier to breathe.
"Or must I sit here all day and be bored while you have all the fun?" Xavier added.
"Fun?"
"You just admitted that little pile of rocks could blow up in your face at any moment. What could be more fun than that? I suppose you won't share that joy, will you?"
"Nope, but it would help if you'd take care of the aluminum." Mac gestured with his chin to a bucket of empty aluminum food containers. "If you burn those, the paper will burn away and you'll get little balls of metal in the ash. Grind them up . . . carefully."
"Maq'." MacGyver looked up, frowning; his head was swimming again and it was an effort to focus. Xavier was digging into a pocket.
"You can use this, perhaps." Mac caught the item one-handed, mostly by reflex, as Xavier tossed it; it took him a moment to realise it was his own Swiss Army knife.
- x -
The guerrillas appeared just before sunset, materialising out of the jungle like messenger spirits from the old Inca kings. Each pozo was visited by a pair of armed senderistas with implacable eyes and a curt summons. Each group of workers was chivvied away at gunpoint by one of the men, while the other lingered for a few minutes.
As Raoul left the processing shed, he turned back and fired a single shot, then barked a harsh command at the workers ahead of him, who had jumped at the sound of gunfire. They hurried away, down the path that led to the big clearing near the airstrip, not far from the river, where the tribunal would be held.
In spite of Maq's reassurances, Pablo had flinched when the deliberately aimed bullet hit the propane tank and pierced it just above ground level. But the Yanqui had told the truth: there was no explosion, no fire, only the hiss of escaping gas and a faint, almost sweet smell that made his nose wrinkle.
Pablo worked quickly. He took out the folded paper packet full of the white crystal substance that he'd prepared so carefully. A long twisted wick of clean white cloth from one of the T-shirts dangled from it. His instructions were clear and easy to follow. He set the packet on the ground between the propane tank and the pozo where the coca was steeping in its reeking mixture of kerosene and water, then pulled out a soda bottle half-full of clear, oily-looking liquid and worried out the cork stopper. The chemical smell hit him, a sharp sting, burning his nose. Thank the Blessed Virgin – no, he wasn't supposed to think that – thank Chairman Gonzalo and the Glorious Revolution that he was a soldier, not a farmer or a slave of the pozos, and he didn't have to breathe that shit all day long.
Maq' had insisted that the bottle had to be set so it was higher than the packet. A chair, a box . . . Pablo found a plastic bucket, upended it, settled the bottle securely on top. He fed the loose end of the cloth wick into the end of the soda bottle, and made sure it was submerged in the liquid and that the wick ran true down to the packet. That was it: he'd done his job. He was part of the great blow they would strike against the Red Witch, the evil hand of the oppressor. The other soldiers of his cadre were playing their parts, planting more of these marvelous devices in every processing shed in the area. He picked up his rifle and hurried away downhill, to rejoin his compadres as they prepared for Terco's tribunal.
Behind him in the shed, the sulfuric acid in the soda bottle climbed smoothly along the clean cotton cloth of the wick, followed the inevitable call of gravity down to the paper packet of white sugar. The acid hit the sugar and began to smoke, the paper swiftly charring as the heat built up. Around the packet, the leaking propane pooled invisibly on the ground and spread, a remorseless trickle of heavy gas dribbling into the processing pit to sit uneasily on top of the pool of kerosene.
Shadows crowded into the empty shed as the sun slid below the horizon and the swift tropical night began to fall. The propane hissed in the darkness.
- x -
Terco himself led half a dozen of his men into the great processing compound near the airstrip, where La Roja's money could be clearly seen in the newer equipment, the less makeshift tools and tables, and the drums and tanks that hadn't yet had time to grow mossy or rusty. There were even metal cabinets for some of the chemicals, although the padlocks had already been stolen.
Amaro grinned his crooked grin at the look on the shed boss's face – they had easily recognised each other. "Hola, Ignacio. Are you still living off the fat of the land? Sucking sweat from honest men's work? Boiling them alive for their grease like a pishtaco?" Ignacio blustered as he was led away, at the head of the entire crew, to stand trial beside the traquateros.
Behind them, Sinchi waited with four other men for a full ten minutes before moving in. Their target was the kerosene stores: a 55 gallon drum was centrally located at each cluster of three or four pozos, and another dozen drums stood ready near the central chemical storage area. Each man had one of the screw-top jars of minced aluminum, and an IncaKola bottle of hydrochloric acid.
Sinchi waited by the main fuel cache until his men had reached their targets and called out in Quechua that they were ready. Each of them tapped on the drums to find one that was only partly full, found the point where the sound changed to show the level of the liquid, and put a bullet through the drum just above that point. They couldn't smell the vapours oozing out through the bullet holes – the entire compound reeked of kerosene from the pozos – but the prickling of the skin intensified.
Sinchi found a drum that was nearly empty, and smiled. The level of the kerosene had fallen too low for the dregs to be easily reached with an ordinary mounted pump; instead, the lid itself had been loosened, probably by Ignacio, the cheap bastard. He'd want to get every drop out of the drum. Sinchi made certain he'd be able to get the damned lid off himself, then called out to his men to go ahead.
The Yanqui had insisted that the job had to be done quickly; they would only have a few minutes to clear the area, although he couldn't predict how fast they'd have to move. The jars were opened and the acid poured in over the metal; the lids screwed back on, quickly but securely – that had been emphasised also. Make it tight, or we waste our time and La Roja laughs tomorrow instead of weeping. Sinchi dropped his jar into the nearly-empty drum and quickly clapped the lid back on; the evil stuff in the jar had already begun to bubble and fizz, growing warmer in his hand even as he held it for those brief moments. His men set their seething jars down beside their drums. Maq' had told them the kerosene vapours would flow downwards from the holes, like unseen water.
They ran from the compound for the screen of the jungle as if chased by starving pishtacos.
- x -
Mac and Xavier slipped along the narrow footpath that wriggled its way through the jungle. No-one could ever maintain a direct trail in the rain forest; even when a path started out straight, it had to bend and jink around obstacles. When colonies of voracious ants or stinging termites planted themselves in or near a trail, the path must shift to avoid them: men might quarrel with men, but nobody picked a fight with the insect world.
Terco was busy with his tribunal, and he could be avoided now. His men were scattered through the forest, planting chemical havoc in a dozen locations. Xavier led the way along the path, signaling to MacGyver to wait while he peered through the last screen of foliage at their goal.
They'd hoped that the sweep of workers from the processing compounds would include the personnel at the airstrip – Terco had been determined to corral the traquateros, and two of them were now being marched away, along with an oil-smeared mechanic and a sullen grease monkey of a boy. Diego had the biggest prize at gunpoint, a lighter-skinned man in clean, expensive clothing and shiny boots, with an offended glower on his face.
"The pilot," Mac breathed.
"Sí."
"He sure looks pissed off." Mac slipped up next to Xavier and peered out at the airstrip. "Anyone left behind?"
"Wait."
The tree frogs fell silent as the first gunshots were heard, and didn't resume their calls. There wasn't all that much gunfire – the single shots came sporadically, scattered here and there in the forest, marking the location of each processing shed as well as the progress of Terco's forces as they made their sweeps.
After half a dozen shots had rung out, another two men appeared from behind the rough canvas tarps that marked the fuel depot. They were glancing around anxiously, whispering to each other in Quechua, starting at each new crack. One of them was clearly dithering; the other was reluctant to leave by himself. When a fresh cluster of shots erupted from the main processing compound, much closer to hand, the waverer finally broke. Both men ran into the forest, in the opposite direction to the pozos, and disappeared.
"Let's go," Mac whispered.
The fuel cache was impressive – twenty, no, thirty drums at least, high-octane aviation-grade gasoline. Fifteen hundred gallons, maybe more . . . that oughta make an impression. The airplane must have been refueled by now; it was tied down for the night, barely twenty yards away – a Britten-Norman Islander, turbocharged to handle the high-altitude flying between here and Colombia, capable of carrying three-quarters of a ton of base coca paste with each flight. Probably fully loaded, and only waiting for tomorrow's sunrise to make its next shuttle run to Cali.
Xavier eyed the plane thoughtfully. "Could you fly that thing, amigo?"
MacGyver ran his tongue across suddenly dry lips and swallowed hard, trying to remember how long had it been since he'd flown any kind of aircraft. He shook his head. "Not one-handed . . . and it makes for a real lousy trip when your pilot passes out in mid-air."
They worked quickly: Xavier with a fierce, almost gleeful energy, MacGyver dogged, but careful and precise. The pain in his swollen arm was growing again, beginning to throb with a maddening beat like really bad disco music. He'd left his shirt behind when they'd slipped out of the abandoned camp – he hadn't felt up to the painful challenge of getting it back on under the sling, and even the pressure of the light cloth over the sling hurt too much. Now, with night falling, he was starting to shiver again. He gritted his teeth and made his hand work smoothly in spite of the tremors.
"You're very good at this," Xavier observed companionably. "Have you had a lot of practice?"
"Too much," Mac grunted, wondering foggily if Xavier meant stubborning his way through injuries, or committing sabotage. He thought, briefly, of some of the missions he'd been sent on in his DXS days – even when the target really needed to be taken out, he'd hated being sent to plant bombs instead of defusing them. It had always gone against the grain. And it was just too easy – today had been way too easy. It was unnerving, how easy this was. It's always too danged easy to destroy things . . . the trigger's connected to the detonator, the detonator's connected to the explosive.
They finished their work and ran – or tried to run; MacGyver stumbled and Xavier cursed, fell back to Mac's right side, seized his right arm and slung it over his own shoulders. He was tall for a Peruvian, sure-footed in the darkness as he half-carried Mac along the path towards the river.
They were well into the shelter of the forest when the explosions began, far enough that the shock waves slammed into the trees instead. But nothing could shield them against the shattering concussion of sound. MacGyver felt as if his throbbing body and aching head were exploding as well; his heart was racing and his breath came in gasps. Spots of flame swam in front of his eyes. He stumbled again, his feet tangling and his legs gone rubbery, and tried to pull away from Xavier's grip before he dragged them both down. The grip tightened instead, and he could hear Xavier swearing at him.
"Goddamn you, amigo, don't you give up on me now . . . move your goddamned feet . . . "
- x -
In the big clearing near the river, a bonfire had been lit, although there was plenty of light from the moon, only one day past full. The only sound was Terco's voice as he harangued and denounced. No voices were raised in the crowd – not even murmurs or whispers, although over a hundred workers had been forced to gather for Terco's tribunal. They stood silent, watching and waiting to see what would happen next, to be told the conditions that would allow them to survive the night and live to the next dawn. If there were going to be any survivors – whether facing the Army or Sendero, no-one in Peru ever made that assumption.
The first fireball blossomed in the darkness, halfway up a hillside, scarlet and orange flame against the shadow of the forest: first a small bloom as the propane ignited, then a second puff as the kerosene in the pozo went up. The fire showed for a moment as a silent night-blooming flower; then the thump and roar of the explosion reached the ears of the crowd at the tribunal.
The sound was still drawing echoes from the hills across the river when the next pozo went up, and the next – this one was part of a larger complex, and the billowing puffs of flame piled up, one on top of another, as the first explosions spread to the rest of the shed, igniting anything burnable. A rolling wave of sound bore inexorably down upon the watchers; men screamed and covered their ears, while Terco threw his head back and began to laugh, his roar of triumph almost as loud as the first distant explosions.
He was still laughing when the big compound went up in a shattering series of deafening thunderclaps, a tower of flame and smoke piling up on itself, bathing the river valley with a hideous fiery sunset. Behind the sound came the shock waves, ripping into the trees like the pounding hand of a furious god, carrying enough force to slam into the assembled crowd and knock them sprawling, screaming with terror.
Then the fuel depot at the airstrip erupted in a roar and a blaze that made all the other explosions nothing more than an opening salvo. The night shredded into a thousand noisy fragments, punishing the ears with a thunder beyond imagining. Trees rippled and swayed and bent before the hammer blows, raining down leaves and branches.
The men could not bend like the trees, quickly enough or smoothly enough; accusers and accused, watchers and listeners alike cowered and tumbled to the ground, clutching at heads that rang with the concussion, squeezing eyes shut against the terror, waiting for the next blow that must surely be fatal. The world was bathed in flame, blood-red and orange and searing yellow-white, brighter and hotter than the midsummer sun. The descendants of the Inca had come to ransom back their stolen land from the invaders, paying out a treasure of burning gold, a fiery cataclysm upending and ending the world.
- - x - -