Guatemala – Journey into Evil. David Monnery
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smiled at him. ‘I remember you sulking for days when they lost.’
‘I was only about six.’
‘Twenty-six, more like. Hajrija phoned,’ she added. ‘Your boss wants to talk to you. Urgently.’
‘The CO?’
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Davies. He wanted you to call him as soon as you got in. The number’s by the phone in the hall.’
Razor left her with Peter Snow and walked out into the hall, wondering what could be so urgent that it couldn’t wait until the morning. If Hajrija had passed on the message, then she had to be all right.
He keyed the number, listened to eight rings, and was about to give up when a somewhat breathless Davies answered.
‘Wilkinson, boss,’ Razor replied. He could hear a woman’s voice in the background, which both surprised and vaguely pleased him. He had always felt an instinctive liking for Barney Davies, and it was fairly common knowledge around the Regimental mess that the man’s marriage break-up had turned him into a social recluse. Maybe he was coming out of his shell at last.
Or, then again, it might be a hooker. Or his mother.
‘Something’s come up,’ the CO was saying. ‘Remember the week you and Docherty spent in Guatemala in 1980?’
‘Christ, not very well. I’d only been badged a few months. Why, what’s happened?’
Davies told Razor exactly what Clarke had told him, and did his best to keep his doubts to himself. Before airing them, he wanted Razor’s reaction. ‘Would you be able to recognize this man?’ he asked, hoping the answer would be no.
‘Yeah, I don’t see why not. We spent quite a lot of time with him. Even taught him how to play Cheat.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. He was holding English hostages, and threatening to kill them.’ He paused. ‘Docherty sort of liked him, though,’ he said.
Davies grunted. ‘Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘What about Chris Martinson?’ Razor asked.
‘What about him?’ Davies asked, surprised.
‘He’s in Guatemala.’
‘He is? I had no idea. What the hell’s he doing there?’
‘There’s a town there where you can do Spanish courses and live with a family while you’re doing them. He’s hoping for a field job with one of the charities when his term ends, and he wanted to bring his Spanish up to scratch.’ Razor grunted. ‘And no doubt he’s doing some bird-watching while he’s there.’
‘How long has he been gone?’
‘Two weeks, two and a half…I’m not sure. I think he’s due back at the end of next week. He had a lot of leave piled up.’
‘Ah,’ Davies said, wondering how he could make use of the coincidence. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘sleep on this, and I’ll see you in my office when you get here in the morning.’
‘OK, boss,’ Razor said, wondering why the CO sounded so anxious. Maybe he’d forgotten to drop in at Boots on the way home to pick up some condoms. Or maybe he knew more about the situation in Guatemala than Razor did. Which wouldn’t be difficult. He couldn’t remember reading or seeing a single news item about the place in the past fifteen years.
He did remember the ruins where the negotiations had taken place. The two of them had driven there by jeep along the jungle road from Belize, stayed in a one-room inn which deserved a minus-five-star rating, and met with the terrorist leader on a square of grass surrounded by soaring stone temples. Tikal had been the name of the place. There had been monkeys in the trees, and huge red parrots zooming round in formation like dive-bombers, and those birds with the huge multicoloured beaks whose name he couldn’t remember. Around dawn the mist had lingered in the trees, and one morning he and Docherty had climbed to the top of one of the temples and seen the tops of the others sticking out through the roof of mist like strange islands in a strange ocean.
He was only twenty-one then, not much more than a kid, and he supposed he hadn’t really appreciated it.
‘You OK?’ his mother asked from the living-room doorway.
‘Yeah, fine. It’s just one more job that no one else can do.’
The moon had been gone for several minutes, and the luminous haze above the distant ridge-top was visibly fading. Tomás Xicay could almost feel the sighs of relief as true darkness enveloped the clearing where the compas were taking a ten-minute rest-stop. There was nothing but shadows around him, and the rustle of movement, and the whisper of conversation.
A hand came down on his shoulder. ‘Is everything OK, Tomás?’
‘Sí, Commandante,’ he told the Old Man. He was tireder than tired, but then which of them wasn’t? Except maybe the Old Man himself, who always seemed utterly indefatigable.
‘Only a few weeks,’ the Old Man said wryly, and moved on to encourage someone else.
Tomás smiled to himself in the dark. When, two months earlier, their current strategy had been agreed, that had been the crucial phrase. ‘We must get them on the run, if only for a few weeks,’ the Old Man had told the group leaders gathered that night on the hill outside Chichicastenango. ‘Show the Army and the Americans that we are still alive, and that they are not immune to retribution.’
What would happen after those ‘few weeks’ no one knew for certain, but there was no doubt that the sort of aggressive tactics they had decided on would have a limited lifespan, because surprise always carried a diminishing return, and without it they would always be outgunned. And they knew that the longer they pursued these tactics the more certain it was that most of them would be killed.
As the column got back underway Tomás found himself wondering whether the Old Man ever had any doubts, and if so who it was he shared them with. Tomás at least had his sister, though being the man of the family he naturally tried to shield her from his more negative feelings. On his return from the city she had been quick to notice that something had upset him, and he had told her it was just seeing their relations, and the family memories they brought back. That had been true, but it was not the whole truth. During his days in the city he had seen their struggle in a different light, and it had disturbed him.
This column of compas, striding through the night forest, seemed so full of strength and rightness, so powerful…but there were only forty-four of them, and only the trees and the darkness shielded them, and not 150 kilometres away two million people were getting on with their daily lives oblivious to the guerrillas’ very existence. In the city it was hard to believe that the Government could ever be toppled, that anything could shift the dead-weight of all that had gone before. It all seemed so permanent, so solid. Five hundred years’ worth. And when Tomás thought about how much his people had suffered to keep their world alive, he found it hard to imagine the world of the Ladinos and the Yankees proving any less stubborn.
Still, no matter how much he might doubt their eventual triumph, he never doubted the need to continue with their struggle. What, after all, was the alternative? To accept the way things were? The poem in Tomás’s pocket had the words for that: ‘…it seems to me that it cannot be, that in this way, we are going nowhere. To survive so has no glory.’
It had been the Old Man who had introduced him to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, a few months after their first meeting in the Mexican refugee camp. By then they had become firm friends – or perhaps more like father and son – but at the beginning Tomás had found it hard to take the older man seriously. His stories had seemed so outlandish, so much like comic-book adventures, that Tomás had taken him for the camp storyteller, more of an entertainer than a fighter.
In one story the Old Man had been taking some explosives to the guerrillas in the mountains, when he was