Chapter Nineteen
The Phone Call
El was enjoying himself. He was good at this, and after the pain and frustration of the last few days it felt good to be able to move and to kill bad people.
Explosives, admittedly, were not his area, but he had had enough experience with them to do.
He returned to the door the way he'd come, staying in the cover of the jungle, watching for the trip wires. In the backpack he found cylinders of plastic explosive and detonators. He knew how to apply them, but he didn't know how much. With a grim smile he put all of it around the door. What did he care if the explosion buried the stuff under concrete rubble? He took the detonator with him around the side of the building and back into the jungle. He hit it.
A second explosion boomed across the jungle, much louder than the dynamite. A plume of grey smoke rose gracefully above the bunker. As it cleared, El saw, to his dismay, no change on the front of the building. Then, movement. He gripped his guns.
The thick steel door, warped and deprived of its support, toppled slowly forward, thudding onto the ground. Damaged concrete rimming the hole it left behind, crumbled and fell.
The explosive had been exactly enough. El was almost disappointed.
He trotted into the clearing, head down, to position himself on the outside of the sandbag barricade. He fired a burst of automatic fire into the doorway, leaped the barricade, and rolled inside, still firing forward. He ended up squatting, just inside the door, a gun in each hand.
A body lay in a pool of blood near one of the window slits. The room held a card table with cards, five folding chairs, three plastic coolers and three camping lamps. El's bullets had made a mess of the table and chairs, and water streamed from holes in one of the coolers. In the corner were rifles and ammunition. There was no one else and no other rooms.
El was not surprised. He'd noticed that the defenders in the bunker had never fired out into the jungle at random after his assault from the roof. He'd guessed he'd killed them all.
But one thing was missing. El kicked the lids off of the coolers. Inside were ice, beer and water. There was no cocaine. Anywhere.
Not his problem. He had plenty of guns, what he needed was a phone. He knelt beside the dead man and searched him. A thrill of excitement went through him as he found the phone on the man's belt.
He glanced out the tiny window. No sign yet of his keepers.
He opened the phone. Yes, it had a signal. El took a steadying breath and carefully reviewed the notes Sands had been singing as well as his own translation into the numbers. He dialed.
"Bueno," a man answered.
"Marco," El said.
"Who is this?" The man spoke Colombian-accented Spanish. Sands had said the number belonged to Marco, Delgado's old cocaine supplier, but El had half expected that he was calling the CIA. That seemed less likely, now.
"Information."
A pause. "One moment."
The voice returned. "Who are you with?"
El hesitated. "Sands," he said, his heart pounding.
"I don't know any Sands."
"Delgado is growing a new crop. The plants can live through freezing temperatures."
"Where?"
"I don't know. But you can find it. Look for his property too high in the mountains for ordinary coca to grow."
Another pause. "What's in this for you?"
"Revenge."
El glimpsed movement outside. He closed the phone and replaced it on the dead man's belt.
Fat Man and the three remaining Delgado men must have screwed up their courage to move out of the jungle. There wasn't much risk that the Orozcos had booby trapped their own fortifications at the front door.
"Mariachi!" Fat Man called.
"Come on in," El replied.
The others filled the room. Astute as ever, Fat Man asked, "Where's the stuff?"
El shrugged. "You tell me."
The men dumped the coolers and threw around the chairs and table with frustrated cries. El turned his back on them, thinking. Four men wouldn't defend to the death an empty building. Hadn't Sands said the cache was in a basement? But the floor here was dirt.
El kicked at the dirt. He moved to another place and kicked at the dirt. Two of the men noticed what he was doing, and imitated him. One of them cried out.
In a corner they had found concrete where there should have been dirt. Clearing it further, they found it was a door. In seconds they had it open. El stood back. Only four Orozco thugs were dead, and there were five chairs. Also, no one had brushed the dirt back over the door to hide it. The last man through that door had left no one behind to cover his trail. No one alive.
The door opened without incident. The men peered into it. From where El stood, he could only see the top of a wooden ladder leading into darkness. The men grabbed one of the lanterns, lit it, and lowered it into the hole.
"It's not a basement," someone said. "It's a tunnel."
Puzzle pieces clicked into place for El.
"You. Mariachi," said Fat Man, "you go in first."
"No," said El. "You stay here and make sure no one comes out of it. I know where it ends. I'm going there."
Angry but practical, Fat Man asked, "Where?"
"The ruins," El said, reloading his guns from the ammo in the corner. "They had tunnels so the priests could put on a good show."
As El headed out the door, he heard Fat Man ordering two of the watchdogs to stay behind and one to help him follow El.
El hadn't seen the ruins, except in the slide show, and those pictures had been taken from the air. All he could do was to set off in the correct direction, machete in hand. Behind him, Fat Man panted and talked on his phone, updating Vasquez.