Show No Fear - By Marliss Melton Page 0,18
the dense vegetation of La Montaña.
The mountain rose straight up. Lushly green, its glacial peaks remained hidden in rain clouds that moved sluggishly overhead, pushed by a wet, jasmine-scented breeze.
Nothing happened quickly in Colombia, Lucy reflected.
Seeing the jungle, smelling it, she envisioned how Howitz and Barnes had to feel, cut off from the world, chained like dogs, starved and humiliated. Ten months had to seem like a lifetime. God, she hoped she would never discover that for herself!
Gus’s last communication with the JIC this morning had echoed that same sentiment. “Don’t lose us out there, guys,” he’d murmured into the sat phone. At his teammate’s reply, he’d raked his fingers through his hair. “Well, damn it, sir, we don’t want to be caught in the middle of that,” he’d hissed.
Sensing a problem, Lucy had leaned closer, hoping to overhear.
“Will do, sir. You, too, sir. Out.” He’d severed the call.
“We don’t want to be caught in the middle of what?” Lucy had questioned him once he hung up.
“Intel says a battalion of Colombian infantry are headed this way.”
“Oh, hell,” she’d breathed. “I thought we lost them yesterday.”
“Evidently not. Our guys are busy working through the right channels to get them called off. Don’t worry.”
He’d powered down his cell phone and stowed it in his left boot. Later, he’d given his watch with the compass to the innkeepers’ thirteen-year-old son. Lucy had felt a tug of pity for him. For a man used to relying on his gadgets, it couldn’t be easy to let the watch go.
Other team members had left their belongings with the innkeepers for safekeeping, but Lucy clung tenaciously to her backpack, hopeful the FARC would let her keep a change of socks, her toothbrush, and her anti-malaria pills, at least.
“This isn’t a camping trip,” Gus had reminded her.
“Good. I hate camping.”
Hours had passed since then. Lucy was considering the possibility that the FARC had stood them up when Gus looked up sharply.
“Here they come,” he said, squinting up the road.
She had to look twice. Dressed from head to toe in camouflage, the guerrillas remained virtually invisible against the backdrop of the jungle till they were less than a hundred meters away.
“We should greet them,” suggested Fournier, urging the team to step out into the middle of the street. “Come. Show them your hands,” he urged, “palms facing out.”
There they stood, growing soaked by the cold, steady drizzle, as rebels bristling with AK-47s, their chests crisscrossed with ammunition belts, trooped closer.
We come in peace. Lucy sought to convey that message in her expression, while battling the impulse to assume a fighting stance. A cold sweat made her shiver in her wet clothing. Dread made her scalp tingle. It in no way lessened when she noted that six out of the ten rebels were mere teenagers. Teens were notoriously unpredictable. They didn’t think they could die, either.
Two leaders, older and burlier than the rest, with insignia on their shoulders, detached themselves from the group to approach them.
Fournier stepped forward and, in his accented Spanish, greeted the guerrillas with cautious courtesy.
One by one, they were waved forward and introduced.
Lucy suffered the scrutiny of two dark pairs of eyes, one cynical, the other hostile. The older man, a careworn-looking guerrilla whose beard was shot with silver, was Comandante Marquez. The younger man, Buitre—Buzzard in English—was introduced as his deputy.
Bearing a scar that bisected his left cheek, Deputy Buitre struck Lucy as a dangerous entity. The crude, demoralizing look in his eyes brought back memories of another set of eyes that haunted her dreams. Dislike strangled her words of goodwill.
Gus brushed her arm reassuringly as he stepped alongside her. The commander’s gaze sharpened as he took note of Gus’s physique. “Remove your glasses,” he ordered. “You may not wear them.”
Tension rippled through the team members at this sudden show of hostility.
“Por favor,” Gus murmured convincingly. “I’m blind without them.”
Unmoved by his plea, the commander nodded at his deputy, who snatched the spectacles from Gus’s eyes and tossed them to the ground, crushing the wire rims under his booted heel.
An uncomfortable silence ensued.
Then Marquez gestured up the path with his stainless-steel AK-47. “Regresemos!” he shouted, and his gaggle of armed teens did an about-face, slogging wordlessly up the trail they’d just traversed, looking bedraggled and depressed.
With that, the UN team began their march into the jungle, hastening to keep pace with the diminutive natives, who covered the ground swiftly, challenging them at once to keep up.
“Faster!” ordered Deputy Buitre.
With the mud sucking at her