HOUSE OF JAGUAR Read online

  “I swear you like it,” Johnny sighed. “You like this shit.”

  The jungle reached up, solid rolling waves of canopies with taller bare ceibas clawing up like drowned skeletons, down to two hundred feet, a hundred eighty, tipping the wings now between the tallest trees. “One time in high school,” Murphy said, “I was in a class play. Only had to say one word: ‘No’. Can you imagine, I blew it? I got so afraid I’d say ‘Yes’ by mistake, that when the time came I couldn’t remember which it was and said ‘Yes’? Screwed the whole thing up. Or maybe I was supposed to say ‘Yes’ but said ‘No’. Can’t remember.”

  “You’re not the brightest bulb in the box, Murph. Always told you that.”

  A river’s great black serpent slithered under the wing, sparkling with starlight. “Río Hondo,” Murphy said. “We’re back in Guatemala.”

  “When we get out this time,” Johnny said, “I’m going to bag it too.”

  “Figured you were.”

  “I really like being with Sarah. She’s easy, she’s amazing. She loves me.”

  “All that counts.”

  “I really miss the kids, Murph. You were lucky, when you and Pam split, you didn’t have kids.”

  “Don’t know what I would’ve done. What’s Diana say?”

  “She won’t give them up, but if Sarah and I get married, she’ll let me have more visitations.”

  “Fuckin world,” Murphy said. The engines steadied, almost hypnotic, the jungle drifting closer, as if the Aztec hung suspended over the slowly spinning globe. Ahead the land steepened into towering ridges of black stone with jungle on their crests. Deeper into a box canyon the plane droned, its echo bouncing off the cliffs that narrowed toward its wingtips. An end wall of vertical stone hurtled toward them; at the last second Murphy slid back the yoke, powered the throttles and the nose lifted and the saddle swept beneath them and they floated easily into a wide valley under a bowl of stars.

  “Fuckin cowboy,” Johnny said.

  SEVERAL TRUCKS were coming. Not from Machaquilá but the south. The soldier wiped dew from his barrel with his hand, took a breath and held it, hearing his heart.

  Lights brushed the pine tops and darted down the road. Headlights glinted round a curve – two trucks coming fast. The first roared past, a dark Bronco with orange roof lights. Then a Ford pickup with a camper top passed the soldiers, halted and backed off the road onto the shoulder. Two men got out and began to unload something from the back.

  Half a mile down the road the Bronco’s brake lights flashed as it stopped and turned. One of the men at the pickup stood with a flaring lantern and began to pull crates from the back. From each crate he took another lantern and lit it.

  The men placed a lantern on each side of the road. They ran up the road, stopping in front of the soldiers to drop off a second pair of lanterns, and turned back down the road toward the Bronco with the other lanterns. The Bronco was moving closer; it too was dropping off pairs of lanterns.

  “DOWN THERE’S Xultún,” Murphy said. “A whole Mayan city − temples, schools, farms, observatories − all drowned in the bush.”

  The jungle had flattened, tilting west from the Pine Ridge mountains toward the black defiles of the Río de la Pasión. “Suppose the Mayans knew?” Johnny said. “That it’d die someday, their civilization?”

  “Maybe they were smarter than we are...”

  Johnny laughed. “Can’t lose what you ain’t got.”

  “Radar again.” Murphy dropped lower, skimming the trees, slid back the mini-window and the engine roar bounced up at him from the treetops. Little spots danced before his eyes, circles with black centers like the fuselage markings on British bombers. “Petén highway,” he said, nudging the rudder to swing southwest along a narrow dirt road.

  “There was a guy,” he said, “in one of their myths, named Utzíl. He got tired of staying home so he wandered south through the desert, found an alligator dying of thirst and carried him on his back to a lake, went on to his enemies’ lands and fell in love with the king’s daughter.”

  “Kind of thing you’d do.”

  “The king’s soldiers chased the two of them all the way back to the lake. He hid the girl in a cave and the alligator appeared and carried him on his back across the lake so he could get help.”

  “Would you watch that fuckin tree!”

  “It was five feet under the wing! You want to fly higher, so the radar picks us up and we get A37s all over our ass?”

  “So what happened,” Johnny said, after a minute, “to the girl?”

  “When they got back the girl had died and he threw himself off a cliff into the water. Lake Atitlán it was, southwest of here...”

  Black pastures and tin-thatched roofs flitted under the wing, hearth smoke smudging the stars, the distant starboard glimmer of Dolores, the town named Sorrows; he swung west of the road to miss the Army outpost then SSE back over the road at Machaquilá, an Indian name for all Indian things lost, with its wan lamps and vacant streets, a sawmill and scattered tree corpses, the unfinished church gaping like a broken skull, the barracks school by the zipping road; and he banked right then left into the cleft beneath the two steep hills that always seemed like tits, ziggurats, like the temples of Tikal, air rushing like a river over the plane’s skin.

  No shear now, he prayed, no crosswinds. The yoke was hot, vibrating in his palm, sweat tickling his ribs. He checked the landing gear: all down. “There they are!” Johnny said. Murphy eased the engine into low pitch, dropped the flaps, notched back the throttles, lifting the nose, and flared in a near stall down through the trees toward two rows of lanterns with the rutted road between them.

  2

  AIRSPEED EIGHTY, then seventy, the Aztec came down between the outreaching pine boughs toward the first lights, a man waving up. One wheel touched, bounced, caught a rut, yanking the plane starboard, pine boughs slapping the wing; Murphy gunned the port engine holding the nose high to pull it back till both wing wheels settled and the nose wheel dropped with a whump of gravel. Pumping the brakes he reversed the props till their roar shook the cabin, taxied back to the first lanterns, where the Bronco and pickup truck were parked, and cut the engines.

  Johnny let out his breath. He lifted a heavy daypack from between his feet and set it on his lap. “Halfway home.”

  Murphy leaned back in his seat and stretched, feeling the muscles snake up his thighs and back, and popped open the door. The air was warm and watery and smelled of rotten vegetation. So natural up there, he thought, the ground’s a comedown. He hesitated in the seat, not wanting to leave the familiarity of the Aztec’s instrument panel and its worn controls, its sheltering cockpit and comfortable seat. “Home’s where the heart is.” He patted the instrument panel offhandedly, as though closing switches. A mosquito whined, touched his cheek. He slapped it, climbed out and slid down the wing and stood unsteadily in the glare of the lanterns.

  The engines smelled of heat and avgas. There was a dent smeared with pine sap in the starboard wingtip.

  “Murph – qué tal!” A tall skinny man with a thick beard ducked toward him under the wing.

  “Goddammit, Paco! You didn’t fix the potholes!”

  “The what?”

  “The potholes – los huecos – en el fuckin camino! Now I got a dent in my fuckin wing!”

  “Ah, them.” Paco kicked at the ground. “Los baches. If we filled them the Army would’ve noticed.”

  “How many guys you got out?”

  “Two at each end. Beyond the lights.”

  “You got my fuel?”

  “Sí, aviation fuel, as ordered.” Paco called over his shoulder, “Ernesto – los depositos!”

  A man in a red bandanna and a Harley Davidson T-shirt pulled fuel cans from the back of the Bronco and lifted them up for Murphy to pour one at a time into the wing tank. Johnny Dio stood in the glare of a lantern inspecting large bags of grass that Paco unloaded from the rear of the Fo
rd. Johnny broke open and smelled each brick, put it back in its bag and resealed the bag. He hooked a spring scale to the port engine cowl and weighed the bags one by one, writing down the weights on a notepad and passing the bags up to Murphy to load through the starboard baggage door into the cabin.

  “Murph, he is getting crazy,” Paco said, “seeing huecos – faggots, on this road here.”

  “He must be hueco con sus ojos – proud of his vision,” Ernesto answered, pissing at the side of the road, “to see faggots where there ain’t none.”

  “Maybe he means you, hueco − so zip your little mosquito back in your pants −”

  “Fifteen hundred and twenty-three pounds.” Johnny shrugged the daypack off his shoulders. “You can keep the twenty-three or throw it in...”

  “What am I to do, hombre?” Paco said. “Smoke it going home?”

  Johnny gave him the daypack. “One hundred thirty-five grand. All used twenties and fifties. No hay riñas.” Murphy bit a thumbnail as he watched Paco flip through the money in the all-encompassing hiss of the lanterns.

  Paco came closer. “Listen, Murph − you doing deals with anybody else?”

  “You asking me that seriously?”

  “Sí, amigo. People have been getting it − Flores, Dolores, Izabal. They fly in, everybody gets extinto.”

  “By the Army?”

  “Carlos says so. So you be careful, if you’re doing any other deals.”

  Murphy shook his head. “We’re uno a uno.” He stepped up on the wing. “Anyway, I may be tying it up.”

  “No more?”

  Murphy shrugged. “I’ll let you know, through Lucia.”

  Paco closed the daypack and looped it over one shoulder. Johnny hugged him, climbed into the cabin and buckled his seat belt. “Gracias, compadres! Twenty-five thousand norteamericanos thank you also...”

  Paco’s grin, his hand half-raised, the daypack slung over his shoulder, were caught in a burst of lights; standing on the wing Murphy saw it instantly − the glaring jungle, white plane and green Ford pickup, Ernesto in his red bandanna with one foot in the Bronco’s cab, the harsh affronted jungle. He dove into the cabin and punched the starter thinking the starboard engine will be slow to start but I can run her down the road on one; if it’s soldiers they’ll shoot from both sides and we’ll have to duck low and hope they don’t hit the wing tanks; even if they do we can get a few miles if there’s no fire. Over the whine of the starter a bullhorn blasted from the jungle, “Estan rodeados!” and a shot cracked as the port prop lurched a quarter turn and halted.

  White smoke puffed from the port manifold, the prop spun slowly; Ernesto lay on his back, one foot still in the Bronco; there was a hole in the plane’s windshield and Murphy thought I have to stop or they’ll kill us. The plane began to jerk forward but soldiers blocked the road. Johnny was yelling but Murphy couldn’t hear over the crash of bullets caving in the windshield and the second engine catching.

  The plane picked up speed and the soldiers scattered as a pink tracer leaped out from the jungle and hammered the plane, Johnny jumped up as if he would smash through the canopy, punched Murphy’s shoulder and fell against the stick. Murphy shoved him aside, the plane was moving fast now down the road with the bullets crashing through the fuselage past his face and knocking out pieces of broken windshield and sparking off the props, his whole body reaching upward to break free of the ground; smoke and flame burst back from the starboard engine, the cabin was blasted white with heat; the huge bang made him think the plane had been hit by a shell but it was the wing exploding; the plane cartwheeled off the road smashing him against the roof and floor and stick, Johnny was on top of him with flames coming up his sides and the door jammed, skin peeling off Johnny’s face.

  He tried to pull Johnny through the windshield but one arm wouldn’t work; his clothes were on fire and the pain was so awful he had to drop Johnny, grabbed him again but the seat belt was buckled so he crawled over him to unbuckle it and yanked him down over the plane’s melting nose, bullets slapping into Johnny as Murphy dragged him toward the trees.

  Johnny was screaming, then Murphy realized it was himself not Johnny; a machine gun round had taken half of Johnny’s chest, bullets singing through the pine trunks, boots running and rifles crackling and the Aztec seething and sending up long spirals of superheated exploding air. His arm was broken − that’s why it wouldn’t work.

  Clasping the broken arm against his ribs he ran into the jungle, seeing at first by the light of the burning plane, then deeper into the darkness. He smacked his face against a bough, behind him soldiers yelling, “Por aqui! Por aqui!”

  He caught his breath, listening for dogs. Now that he knew the arm was broken it hurt horribly, blood spattering on the leaves. They don’t need dogs, he realized − they’ll track you by your blood.

  He tore loose a liana with his teeth and with his good left hand twisted it round his right biceps above the bleeding bullet hole and the pieces of broken bone poking through the flesh. From afar, above the now-distant crackling plane and the yells and snapping brush, came a familiar flutter, a loudening chatter. He ran, vines snagging his broken arm, mangroves barring his way, lost a shoe in a bog but kept running, smashing into trees and branches, stumbling, falling, running again.

  The chatter grew to a clatter of down-beaten boughs and branches as the chopper’s rotors flattened the treetops and its light darted down the trunks. A bullet whacked a bough; he fell, tried to crawl under a bush, but there were too many branches and he squirmed on his belly, dragging the broken arm, into a thicket of saplings. The chopper’s light leaped over the thicket, dashed away. Soldiers ran past, boots shaking the ground.

  The chopper swung east, its rotor roar hardening briefly as it crossed the road. Between the sapling stems he could see the firefly wink of soldiers’ flashlights and hear the swish-chunk of their machetes.

  “Is that you?” Right behind him the voice, in English with a Spanish accent. Murphy tried to duck but couldn’t, hemmed in by the thicket, his back expecting the bullet, the horrible pain. “Is that you, Lieutenant Gallagher?”

  Murphy bit his lip. Anything to live, even a moment longer. “What you want?” It was another voice, American. “I’m over here!”

  “It’s Angel,” the first said. “I got something!”

  Now it comes, Murphy realized, the bullets crushing and tearing.

  “Over here!” Angel said, still in English.

  “I’m coming,” Gallagher answered. “What you got?”

  “Tracks,” Angel whispered. “Hurry!”

  Brush scraped and rattled as Gallagher neared. His flashlight danced round Murphy’s thicket. But he did not seem to see, or he was waiting to swing round the thicket so he could shoot Murphy without hitting Angel.

  “Where?” Gallagher huffed.

  “Look down!” Angel whispered. “See that?”

  Someone gasped, fell, rifle clattering. “No –” Gallagher gasped.

  “Sí!” Angel answered. One set of boots stepped quietly away.

  Seconds passed and no bullets came. Mosquitoes landed in Murphy’s ear, on his eyelids, lips, cheeks, wrists, neck, and ankles. He did not move. The helicopter came and went. He rose to his knees and slipped from the thicket, tripped and fell over a soft log − a body, warm, blood spurting from the sliced carotid, a man in uniform. Murphy stood and found the Pleiades in a gap in the branches, and turned west through deepening jungle toward the Río de la Pasión.

  3

  LYMAN WOKE the instant the phone rang. He rubbed his face, cleared his throat, settled his elbows on his desk, and picked up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “Colonel?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Your Indian left Merida at 0215 hours.” The caller’s voice was tinny and indistinct from the scrambler. “He crossed the Guatemalan border, Hondo River, at 0307. TD the Flores-Morales road seven klicks Sierra of Machaquilá at 0357 hours. Hey, what y
ou think of that ‘Skins game?”

  “Impeccable,” Lyman said. “Any other action, that sector?”

  “Couple Guat slicks. You see that interception?”

  “What slicks?”

  “One on the LZ – he’d be your people. The other Cobán to Sayaxché − some general, probably, going for a beer.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant. I owe you one.” Lyman fumbled in his shirt pocket for his Marlboros.

  “Negative. Don’t sweat it.”

  “I will. I hate to owe people.” Lyman hung up, took out a cigarette, shook his head, put the cigarette back in the pack, picked up the phone and punched three numbers. “Get me Cobán.”

  The phone’s distant jangle sounded underwater, slow and deep. It rang on and on. “Sí!” a man answered, sleepy and irritated.

  “Identify yourself, trooper!” Lyman said in Spanish.

  “Sergeant Almédio, Cobán Armed Forces Command, Sir!”

  Lyman waited a moment to let the man’s fear sink in. “Get me Vodega.”

  “Momentino, Sir, momentino!”

  After a wait the man came back on. “Capitán Vodega’s not here, Sir.”

  “What? Where the fuck is he?”

  “I don’t know, Sir.”

  “He on that op?”

  “What op, sir?”

  “Forget it.” Lyman hung up, staring at nothing. Thousands of styrofoam cups had formed overlapping circles on the desk’s mahogany veneer. Why would Vodega be on Gallagher’s op?

  He lit a Marlboro, remembered his resolve, stubbed it out and put it back in the package. He inspected his nails, brown in the quick and muddy yellow at the tips, evenly and tightly trimmed, fingers darker than the desk. He imagined nicotine travelling down his arm into the hand, staining the skin.