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In one story the Old Man had been taking some explosives to the guerrillas in the mountains, when he was stopped at an army roadblock. The soldiers were in a good mood that day, and only gave him a few bruises and burns before telling him he could continue on his way for no more than the price of his sack of beans. Unfortunately this was where he had hidden the explosives, so for an hour or more the Old Man pleaded and whined for the sack’s return. Eventually the lieutenant in charge of the roadblock grew so sick of this incessant lament that he hurled the bag at the Old Man and told him to get lost. His one great achievement in life, the storyteller told his listeners, was not to recoil at the prospect of an explosion as the sack landed at his feet.
And then there was his favourite escape story. He had been staying with comrades in Guatemala City, and alone in the house when the sound of vehicles approaching at high speed had alerted him. He had walked out into the front yard, picked up a broom and started sweeping, just as the lorries came hurtling down the street. They had screeched to a halt and disgorged running soldiers, all of whom raced straight past the Old Man into the house and started breaking furniture. The lieutenant in charge, who had been sent to arrest a notorious guerrilla leader, told him: ‘Get the fuck out of here, old man!’ He had accordingly shuffled off down the street.
Both these stories, Tomás had later found out, were true in every detail. The man he had taken for the camp storyteller was probably the most successful guerrilla leader in the history of Guatemala’s forty-year civil war. And if anyone could ‘get them on the run for a few weeks’, then it was him.
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Barney Davies dropped Jean off at the hospital where she worked, and reached his office before eight, feeling torn between post-coital bliss and pre-mission anxiety. The smile which bubbled up from the one kept fading into the frown caused by the other.
The briefings on the current situation in Guatemala, which had already been faxed from Whitehall, didn’t do much for the smile. There was a lot of talk about that country’s return to civilian democracy, a few pious generalities about increased respect for human rights, and a lot of waffle about the importance of maintaining stability throughout Central America. According to the Foreign Office mandarins, the existence of a Mayan Indian rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas made it all the more imperative that the alleged progress towards an acceptable peace in Guatemala be sustained.
Reading between the lines, Davies was not convinced. After finishing the report he stared morosely out of the window for several minutes, and then ordered a second cup of tea and his first rock cake of the day.
One way of reducing the risks involved in sending Razor into the lion’s den, he had decided, was to send him in with company. The two men had got to know each other during the Bosnian business, and the mere fact that Razor had known that Chris Martinson was in Guatemala suggested at least a minimal level of continuing contact.
What the Guatemalans would think of it, Davies had no idea. Nor did he much care.
The tea arrived, together with a surprisingly friable rock cake.
The seventy-mile drive from Birmingham, most of it on motorways, took Razor about as many minutes. Driving was something he had always done well, and usually faster than this. But as Hajrija had tactfully pointed out, if all the other drivers had his judgement and reflexes then he could get away with driving like a lunatic. Until then…
He was getting older in more ways than one, Razor thought. Ten, fifteen years earlier, and the prospect of a mission like this would have had his body churning out adrenalin by the pint. His heart would have been leaping at the thought of getting away from Hereford and into action, away from routine and into the unknown. One voice in his brain was still singing this song, but only one, and it sounded more like an echo of his youth than a part of the man he now was. Other voices were dolefully reminding him that these overseas outings only ever looked good in prospect and retrospect, and were rarely anything other than terrifying at the time. This particular mission, so far as he could tell, looked about as inviting as a fortnight in Mogadishu. And on top of everything else he would be away from Hajrija for longer than he cared to think about.
By the time he reached Stirling Lines Razor was having trouble keeping in contact with the adventurer within.
Barney Davies greeted him with a wide smile and ordered cups of tea on the intercom. Razor glanced at the photograph frame on the CO’s desk, half expecting to find a new face inside it, but it still contained the familiar picture of his children. In the dim distant past another photograph had featured a wife.
‘What exactly do they want me to do?’ Razor asked, once the tea’s arrival had signalled the start of business.
‘As far as I know, simply identify the man who calls himself “El Espíritu”, or “The Ghost”.’ Presumably he’ll be in custody by then, though how they intend to catch him without knowing what he looks like seems a moot point.’
‘And then?’ Razor asked.
‘You come home.’
Razor grunted. ‘So we have no guarantee that…’ He paused. ‘Well, that they don’t just take him out and have him shot on my say-so.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d want that sort of publicity,’ Davies said carefully.
Razor looked up, feeling the weight of doubt suddenly bearing down on him. ‘Which might just mean that they’ll wait until I’m on the plane home.’
Davies shrugged. ‘Maybe. The US State Department told the Foreign Office that if the Guatemalan Army had a hundred suspects they would probably shoot the lot, just to make sure of getting the right man.’
‘Bastards,’ Razor murmured, leaving Davies unsure whether he meant the State Department, Foreign Office or Guatemalan Army. Probably all three, he decided.
‘Look,’ the CO said, deciding to lay some cards on the table. ‘I don’t like this any more than you do. The Guatemalans are leaning on the Yanks, and they’re leaning on us, and it’s you who’ll pick up the tab…’
‘Come back, Docherty, all is forgiven,’ Razor muttered.
Davies uttered a silent prayer of thanks that Jamie Docherty was now living in Chile, and far removed from this mess. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there’s two ways we can go with this. Either you can refuse outright to go…’ He looked Razor straight in the eye. ‘And if you do I’ll back you all the way.’
‘Thanks, boss, but…’
‘Or you can go out there and play it by ear. When it comes to the crunch you’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to identify this man or not. By then you should have a much better idea of who and what you’re dealing with. On both sides of the fence.’
‘You mean, when the moment comes I just look through the guy with an innocent expression on my face,’ Razor said, amused. ‘I like it.’
‘Not necessarily. We know the man kidnapped a whole tour party, and God knows what else he’s got up to in the last fifteen years. He’s no innocent, whatever else he is.’
‘He must be pretty old by now,’ Razor said. ‘He looked like a pensioner in 1980.’
‘Anyway,’ Davies went on, ‘I’m not sending you out there alone.’
‘I was going…’
‘Chris Martinson can keep you company.’
‘Oh, great. But I was thinking about someone else. The wife has always wanted to see Guatemala for some reason, and…’
‘I don’t think…’
‘Only as a tourist, of course. She can do her own thing while I bond with the Guatemalan Army. She could maybe open the odd fête, if the Guatemalans ask her.’
Davies grinned in spite of himself. ‘I don’t know…’
‘Maybe it’s only an old Yugoslav custom, but she thinks men on diplomatic missions often take their wives along, with all expenses paid by the grateful hosts.’
The CO laughed. ‘I can’t wait to hear what the Foreign Office will say,’ he said, reaching for the phone.
It took five minutes for the secretary to locate Martin Clarke, but far less time for Davies to lose his temper. ‘If you are not prepared to ask the Guatemalans to accept a two-man team then you can go and look for help somewhere else,’ he told Clarke. ‘I am not prepared to send a single soldier, no matter how experienced, into a potential combat situation without any reliable backup.’
‘I am not interested in debating the issue,’ Clarke said.
‘Then just get on with arranging what I asked for,’ Davies said, and slammed down the phone.
Razor raised his eyebrows.
‘He’ll call back in a few minutes,’ Davies said, with a confidence which he only half felt. It was kind of exhilarating, though, telling one of Her Majesty’s Ministers where to get off.
And it worked. Clarke was back on the line in less than five minutes, sounding chagrined but humble. The Guatemalans didn’t quite understand the necessity, he said, but they were happy to provide hospitality for as many Britons as came.
‘Good,’ Davies said. ‘Please inform them that Sergeant Wilkinson will also be bringing his wife, who is eager to visit their beautiful country. They will need accommodation, and so will Sergeant Martinson. He is already in Guatemala, in Antigua.’ He read out the address. ‘If the relevant authorities can liaise with Martinson, he can meet the Wilkinsons at the airport on Sunday. Oh, and we’ll need a ticket for Mrs Wilkinson on the same flight as her husband.’
‘Anything else?’ Clarke asked coldly.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Davies said, and put the phone down. He looked across at Razor, who was grinning at him, and looking not much more than half his thirty-six years. Davies smiled back, determined not to offer any outward display of the sudden sense of foreboding in his heart.
The news that the British had agreed to send their soldier reached Guatemala City soon after dawn, and an eager Alvaro was waiting to inform Serrano of the good tidings when the latter arrived at the G-2 offices in the Palacio Nacional.
‘Good,’ Serrano said, stirring sugar into the coffee which had just been brought to his desk.
‘He will join up with the man in Antigua, the one we knew about,’ Alvaro added. ‘And he is bringing his wife.’
Serrano was pleased. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘That must mean that no pressure has been put on him. If he is bringing his wife he must be happy to come. He will be a good witness.’
‘I thought of putting them in the Pan-American Hotel,’ Alvaro said. ‘Tourists seem to like it.’
‘They like it because it is comfortable, but not so luxurious that the streets outside make them feel guilty,’ Serrano said. ‘A good choice,’ he added.
‘Thank you, sir.’
Serrano sipped appreciatively at the dark coffee. ‘Has there been any progress in the business of finding El Espíritu?’ he asked, knowing full well that if there had been he would have been the first to know.
‘Nothing definite yet, but the net is being drawn in.’
Serrano allowed himself a thin smile. ‘Let’s hope the little shit is in it.’
The sun was sinking behind the twin peaks of Fuego and Acatenango as Chris approached his lodgings. Like most of the houses in Antigua, the Martinez family residence wasn’t much to look at from the outside, offering just a bare wall painted pastel yellow, with two small windows protected by wrought-iron grilles. But once through the gate the visitor found himself in an exquisite courtyard, decorated with palms and flowering pink bougainvillaea, and surrounded by cool, shuttered rooms.
From one of these rooms Chris could hear two voices which had become increasingly familiar over the past two and a half weeks; they belonged to Clara and Romero, the leading characters in the family’s favourite soap opera. Costa del Oro was supposedly made in Colombia, though Chris had never noticed anything which reminded him of his own trip to that country. The programme was basically an Hispanic Baywatch, with even flimsier swimsuits, acting and story-lines. The Martinez family adored it.
He was waved into the only empty seat, next to sixteen-year-old Maria, whose life seemed to revolve around flirting with whoever was at hand, and whom Chris found worryingly attractive. This evening, though, she was too engrossed in the TV show to nestle up to him.
Chris watched it too, feeling pleased that he understood more or less everything that was being said, right down to the occasional – and probably unintentional – ironic nuances. His time in Antigua had certainly delivered the goods as far as his Spanish was concerned, and he had even grown rather fond of his hosts. In many ways they reminded him of an English family – only the names of the soap operas had been changed.
The day’s episode ended with a cliff-hanger which made Chris nostalgic for the subtlety of Neighbours, and left the Martínezes in temporary shock. Senora Martinez recovered first, and headed for the kitchen, announcing over her shoulder that dinner would be in half an hour.
‘There has been a call for you,’ Maria told Chris, fixing her deep-black eyes on him.
‘From who?’ Chris asked.
‘Your embassy in Guatemala City,’ Senor Martinez told him. ‘They want you to call them back. Please, use our telephone.’
Chris did so, and was put through to the Military Attaché, Ben Manley, with whom he had once served in the Green Howards. Manley relayed the new orders from Hereford, half sarcastically adding that it sounded ‘like fun’.
‘Doesn’t it just,’ Chris agreed wryly.
For the next couple of hours he put the whole business to the back of his mind, and concentrated on enjoying his dinner. After he had helped with the dishes – something which still astonished the whole family – he announced he was going for a walk, and then dealt Maria a crushing blow by refusing to ask for her company. He needed to do some thinking, he told her. She gave him a persecuted look.
Once outside, Chris began wandering aimlessly through Antigua’s network of streets, feeling dismayed by the news. He told himself it would be good to see Razor and Hajrija, and that there seemed every likelihood he would now get to see parts of the country which were well off the tourist track. Who knew? – he might even find the twitcher’s holy grail, a quetzal in the wild.
It wasn’t enough. He felt almost cheated, and realized that although he still had two months of his final term to serve, he had begun to think and feel as if the SAS was already behind him.
He had been a good soldier – he was certain of that – but being a soldier, and an SAS soldier at that, had always been a means to an end for him, not an end in itself. It had given him the scope to stretch himself, and to see the wild parts of the world in a way which the tourist or even the seasoned traveller never could. There was no adventure-holiday company yet which offered a week-long hike out of Colombia, across mountains and through jungle, with the forces of a drug cartel and the national army on your tail.
But after Bosnia things hadn’t been the same. Maybe it had been the mission itself, or maybe he had just outgrown one way of looking at himself and the world. Damien Robson had died there, making Joss Wynwood and himself the only remaining survivors of the Colombian mission. That was chilling enough, but not the main reason for his change of heart. In Bosnia he and Razor – both of whom had chosen medicine as their first SAS specialization – had spent as much time looking after people as they had fighting. There had been the women from the Serb brothel, the children injured in the shelling of Zavik. He and Docherty had been round Sarajevo’s City Hospital, and witnessed the incredible dedication of people working in near-impossible conditions.
Back in England he had decided that there were other ways to travel and to serve than with the SAS. He had been quite happy to serve out the remainder of his three-year term. The work was rarely boring and there were always new opportunities to learn. Some of these – like the helicopter pilot’s course he had recently begun – would provide him with skills that were bound to be useful in the sort of Third World situations where he expected to find his civilian future.
What he had not anticipated was that anyone would ask him to take up arms again, much less send him out on loan to an army notorious for its murderous cruelty.
The MI5 report was waiting on Martin Clarke’s desk when he arrived back that evening from a day-trip to Brussels. Placing the miniature hamper of Belgian chocolates to one side – he had forgotten Valentine’s Day the previous year, and decided to shop in advance this time – he took the file across to the armchair by the window and started to read.
Darren James Wilkinson was born on 6 February 1958, which made him almost thirty-seven. And, as Clarke’s wife Sarah would have told him, an Aquarius. He had been raised in Islington and Walthamstow by his hospital nurse mother, and attended the local comprehensives. The name Highbury Grove rang a bell. Wasn’t that the school Rhodes Boyson had been headmaster of? God help the pupils, Clarke thought.
Wilkinson had clearly shown no aptitude for study. He had left school in the summer of 1974, and spent the next eighteen months moving from job to job. He had been out of the country several times during that period, mostly as a travelling football supporter, but there had also been two three-month stints as a barman in Marbella. He had joined the Army soon after his eighteenth birthday. After four years’ service with the Welsh Guards he had applied to join the SAS, and satisfied all the entrance requirements with flying colours.
No doubt his experiences as a football hooligan had come in handy, Clarke thought sourly.
But he had to admit that the man had an excellent service record. His first important job had been the one in Guatemala, and though he had obviously played a subordinate role, he had been commended for his performance. Two years later there had been the business in Argentina, which Clarke already knew about. The only new information in this regard concerned Wilkinson’s subsequent arrest, along with fellow-trooper Stewart Nevis, on a charge of being drunk and disorderly in the Chilean town of Puerto Natales. The two men had apparently defaced a local statue and given the locals an impromptu concert at two in the morning.
‘Once a football hooligan, always a football hooligan,’ Clarke murmured to himself.
Still, Wilkinson had been promoted to corporal almost immediately, and raised to the rank of sergeant five years later, when he joined the staff of the Regiment’s Training Wing. From then until the Bosnia mission early in 1993 he had hardly been out of the UK.
Clarke had never been privy to the details of the affair in Bosnia, and after reading the report’s account he could see why his superiors had not been eager to publicize the matter. The SAS team had been sent in to investigate rumours that one of their own colleagues was running a private war in the Bosnian mountains, and if necessary to extract him by force. Instead of doing so, they had rescued about fifty women from a Serb prison, done everything but assist their renegade colleague in his private war, and then ignored direct orders to bring the man out, escorting a truckload of wounded children to safety instead.
The report attributed this wilful insubordination to the team commander, the now-retired Sergeant James Docherty, but as far as Clarke could see no action had been taken against either him or any of the others. The SAS had simply closed ranks around the matter, as if the Regiment was a law unto itself. Which it probably was, Clarke thought. He was still smarting from the way its Commanding Officer had addressed him a few days earlier.
What had Wilkinson’s contribution to the affair been? Clarke wondered. Had he argued with Docherty, simply followed orders, or even encouraged him? There was no way of knowing. But it was Wilkinson who had married the Bosnian woman that the SAS team brought out with them; Wilkinson who had called the MoD official at RAF Brize Norton ‘a prick’.
Clarke sighed and stared out at the London night. There didn’t seem much doubt that the man was prone to insubordination. But at least he hadn’t been in any trouble since the Bosnian business. According to the report he had suffered from persistent nightmares for a while, but a few visits to the Regiment’s ‘psychiatric counsellor’ had apparently put him back together again. Anyway, he was the one the Guatemalans wanted. They could damn well keep him in order.
Ten minutes later Clarke began telling his contact in the US State Department that there were few finer examples of British soldiering at its brilliant best than Sergeant Darren Wilkinson of 22 SAS.
A solitary bird suddenly began to sing, and after what seemed only a momentary pause, another thousand joined in. Emelia Xicay lay flat on her stomach in the tall grass above the road and listened. For a few minutes the nerves which always preceded an action were banished, and she smiled with unalloyed pleasure. At times like this she always felt truly blessed – this, just as much as the horrors and the sadnesses, was her birthright as a Mayan Indian. Here in the mist she felt herself enveloped by the damp richness of the earth and trees, carried along by the song of the birds. She belonged in the natural world, the way so few foreigners seemed to do.
At such times she felt almost sorry for the Ladinos, who seemed to have no such sense. But not all of them, she reminded herself sternly. Tomás said some understood life and the earth the same way their own people did. He had Ladino friends, and she would too, once she could speak to them fluently in their own language.
She thought about the city, and wondered if she would ever see it. Tomás had told her about it, of course, and so had Francisco, but she suspected that both brother and lover had censored their accounts, as if they was trying to protect her from all the many evils which befell their people there.
She hadn’t thought about Francisco for several days, she realized. It was almost a year now since his death in the army ambush.
She turned her mind back to the city. She didn’t want to live there, just to see it. The biggest towns she had ever visited were Santa Cruz del Quiche in Guatemala and San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico. They had lived just outside the latter for a while, and Emelia had sold woven bracelets to the tourists in the town’s main square with several other refugee children. She could remember lifting up her wares to the smoked-glass windows of the big buses, the pale white hands reaching down with money.
The men on the road below were speaking to each other in low voices, and Emelia thought she caught Tomás’s Tzutujil accent among them. The first hint of light was showing in the mist away to her left, above the deep and hidden valley which carried the road up from Cunen.
He should be leaving about now, if he was leaving at all. According to the reports of the compas assigned to the task of watching over him, Morales was a creature of rigid habits, and so far there had been no sign that the fate of Major Muñoz had persuaded him to deviate from any of his normal routines. Each Friday morning he left the command HQ in Cunen and drove across these mountains to the subordinate outpost at El Desengaño, where he gathered intelligence of the previous week’s operations and planned those for the following week. There seemed no practical reason for this journey by road – radio communication would have served just as well, or a helicopter could have covered the same distance in a tenth of the time – but Morales liked to impose himself in person, and from all accounts he loved to drive, and to be seen driving, his new Cherokee Chief station wagon.
And in any case, the Old Man had said, what did Morales have to worry about? His friends in the neighbouring command would have told him the guerrillas were cowering in the forest, somewhere inside the closing ring of troops thirty kilometres to the west. True, they hadn’t actually been seen for several days, but there was no way they could have broken out.
Emelia hoped the Old Man was right. He usually was.
It was getting steadily lighter now, and holes were beginning to appear in the mist, drifting holes, like floating windows. On the road below she could now see the seven compañeros in their costumes, and the glass cabinet lying on its side. At the foot of the grassy bank Jorge was setting light to the second of two censers packed with incense. Smoke from the first was already wafting up to reinforce the mist, and carrying the sweet, acrid smell to Emelia’s nostrils.
With both censers burning, the group below settled into stillness, like a film frozen on a single frame, waiting to be restarted. Emelia lay there with the rifle, watching the mist slowly clear, hearing the chorus of birdsong gradually abate, feeling the cold edge drawn from the air by the rising sun. Ten minutes went by, and twenty, and thirty, and then she could hear the sound of vehicles. As it grew steadily louder the tableau on the road below sprang back into life. She swallowed nervously, and tried not to grip the rifle too tightly.
As he guided the Cherokee Chief up the steep incline, Captain Juan Garcia Morales was thinking about what to do with his new-found wealth. He had just inherited around 200,000 quetzals from a great-uncle, and those closest to him could not agree as to how he should invest it. His wife wanted him to buy property in Florida, but his father was advising Lake Atitlán. Morales instinctively preferred the Florida option, but he had to admit that his father was rarely wrong when it came to such matters. ‘You get yourself a shoreline on the most beautiful lake in the world,’ he had told his son, ‘and in five years the value will multiply tenfold or more. Once we have the Indian business finally settled you won’t be able to see that lake for investors.’
