As Lost as I Get Page 10

  Wishnevsky snorted, and her chair creaked. “The other paramilitaries won’t stand for that.”

  “The Colombian government insists they’ve cleaned everyone out of this region,” Lee said, although he knew what her reaction would be.

  “Yes, and the cartels are weak and not a threat anymore,” she said with a laugh. “Colombia’s safe as houses. Do you believe that happy horseshit?”

  “Hey, I’m just giving you the official line,” he said.

  Wishnevsky sighed. “We still have no idea why the AC wanted to blow up a building in Bogotá either.”

  “If we don’t figure it out, Guainía’s going to be a war zone,” Lee said grimly. He unfolded his map of eastern Colombia and spread it on the small hotel desk, moving photographs and his empty coffee cup. He traced his finger north along the Rio Inírida, studying the llanos, the plains that were home to the cattle ranches, and the llaneros who worked them.

  “I’ll get in touch with State,” Wishnevsky said. “They may want to issue a travel alert. I don’t imagine we have any diplomatic staff out there, but there are aid workers.”

  Shit. Lee sat back in his chair and grabbed his local phone to check Zoe’s last message to him: “. . . I’ll be going up the river, making rounds of the villages and ranches out there.”

  “Goddamn it,” he said aloud.

  “What is it?”

  “There are some doctors from Médecins International going up the river right now. They’re going to be right in the middle of everything,” Lee said. Two armies wandering the area, looking for supplies, entertainment, and a fight, not necessarily in that order. How long would Zoe be safe? In other countries, a doctor from Médecins International might get a pass, but here? It wasn’t just an ideological fight going on out there, it was about enormous profits for the Cali cartel and the AC—and their respective track record on human rights spoke for itself.

  “I can hear what you’re thinking,” Wishnevsky said, “and no. You’re not equipped for any serious fieldwork, Wheeler. Go to the ENC, get their help.”

  “You want me to blow my cover? I’ve got a recruit in their ranks. It could put him at risk.” Timo was in enough danger as it was, trying to recover from his gunshot wound—the one he got doing Lee’s dirty work.

  “Cut him loose,” Wishnevsky said. “Cut him loose and get the Colombians involved.”

  “Let me just go after the MI team,” Lee said. “I’ll find them, convince them to come back to Inírida.”

  There was silence from the other end while Wishnevsky thought things through. “Who’s on that team? Someone you know? You’re taking this personally.”

  “One of my recruits is in their clinic.” Lee sidestepped the truth. “I know most of them.”

  “All right. Go get them. But do not engage with the AC, the cartel, or anyone else, do you hear me? Do not engage.”

  “I hear you,” Lee said, but another part of his brain was already making a list of everything he’d need to make a trip up the river.

  Chapter Ten

  It was hot as hell. Logic dictated that the weather couldn’t be that much different from in town, but the closeness of the trees and the damp from the river seemed to make everything steamier and heavier. The temperature wasn’t any hotter than the summers Zoe had spent in Miami or New Orleans, but the near-constant rain meant nothing ever got dry. In town, at least, you could go inside and dry off somewhere. Here, there wasn’t enough wet-weather gear to keep the rain and river water off you, and when the rain stopped, the air still hung with moisture, making sure nothing evaporated.

  She wondered if it would be a little drier when they got to Puerta del Ángel. There’d been some discussion about splitting up the group, but Zoe could see no other alternative. She’d made arrangements with Jaime and the other guides that would let her make a quick trip over land with Ana. They’d reach the nearest landing point later this afternoon, where Ana—who was more than qualified as a local guide—and Zoe would disembark while the rest of the team went on to the next village as planned. The flooding had already started to recede here, the farther north they went, which meant that Zoe and Ana might not have to actually swim to Puerta del Ángel.

  Strictly speaking, it was against MI regulations for her to break off from the team, and rightfully so. But Zoe couldn’t just ignore someone that needed help—and that was more important to her than a regulation.

  Ana estimated they would have about a two-hour walk from the river to the ranch, and Jaime had concurred. It was far from the most dangerous thing Zoe had ever done. And she wasn’t entirely helpless. Her cell phone was useless this far out, but she had a satellite phone in her bag for any emergencies. Plus, their ordinary gear included a machete for cutting through foliage—not that she could ever imagine using it against another living thing, but the threat might be enough.

  A few hours later, they reached the landing point. As they were climbing out of the boats onto the first comparatively dry land Zoe had seen in two days, Ana laughed. “You look like you’re sulking.”

  Zoe grinned. “Did I? I was hoping to see one of the dolphins.” She shouldered her pack and reached for the crate of medical supplies she was bringing along. The crate, her pack, and her T-shirt were all blazoned with the MI logo, and the crate also bore a red cross. Ana’s gear was marked as well, all to signify who they were and what they were doing out here.

  “This time of year, you’re as likely to see them swimming in between the trees,” Ana said.

  That was never going to get old. Zoe already couldn’t wait to come back and visit this same area during the dry season, just to see how the landscape had changed. “Come on, we’ve got a long walk.”

  “You have the sat phone?” Jaime started up the motor again.

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “We’ll call if we need to, otherwise, plan to meet here in two days.”

  “I’ll be here.” The motor burbled and buzzed as the boat pulled away from shore to catch up with the others.

  ***

  The landscape grew starker the farther they got from the river. The trees thinned out into heavy grasses, dotted with tall mud cylinders that Ana said were termite mounds. Zoe shuddered and kept her distance—some of the mounds were taller than she was.

  “This isn’t your first mission,” Ana said as they trudged through the mud.

  “No,” Zoe agreed.

  “You’ve been places in trouble before?”

  Zoe focused on pulling her boots out of a particularly sticky patch of mud. “A few. Mexico was probably the worst.” That was a colossal understatement.

  “Why don’t you get that we want to improve things then?” Ana didn’t sound angry or challenging, just curious.

  Zoe stopped walking and pulled her canteen from the side of her pack. She took a long swallow of the almost body-warm water before answering. “I do get that. As dangerous as it is for you living here, do you know how dangerous it can get for foreign aid workers? Because I do, firsthand.” Even saying that much was a struggle. There was no way she could tell Ana the whole story.

  Ana lowered her own canteen mid-sip. “Something happened to you.”

  “Yeah.” Zoe put back her canteen and nodded toward the dirt track ahead of them, and they started walking again. “Will knows about it. Which is why I can’t believe he brought this to my door.”

  “I don’t think he had a choice,” Ana said.

  Zoe didn’t have an answer for that, and they walked on in silence.

  They heard the cattle long before they saw them, the lowing carrying over the air while they could only see a cloud of dust up ahead. How there could still be dust anywhere in this sodden countryside was beyond Zoe. Anywhere else in the world, and at any other time of year, someone would call what they were walking through a bog.

  As they got closer to the herd, the sounds of the llaneros yelling
at the herd carried, and there was a recognizable sound of hoof beats. Not a thunder, just a steady thudding.

  This close, the cattle were a little terrifying, enormous and long-horned. They lipped at the blades of grass sprouting up from the drying mud patches, hooves leaving divots that slowly filled with water. Zoe didn’t even try to count them, but there had to be at least a hundred in her immediate vicinity. She spotted three men on horseback, carefully nudging the herd in the direction they wanted it to go. One of the three saw them and rode over.

  Logically, Zoe knew the llaneros wouldn’t be wearing traditional garb, but she was still mildly disappointed that the thin, wiry man was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and boots, thin rope coiled across his horse’s saddle. “You lost?” he asked in Spanish.

  “I hope not.” Zoe smiled her brightest and most charming smile. “We’re with Médecins International. We’re trying to get to Puerta del Ángel to visit a patient.”

  “Tia Yana.” The man broke into a smile, revealing a row of crooked teeth. “Ramon said there’d be some doctors. You’re gonna help her?”

  “If we can.”

  “She used to cook for the ranch boss, back when my dad worked there. We were sorry to hear she was sick.”

  “So you know where we can find her?” Ana asked.

  He pointed to the southeast. “There’s a little village about six kilometers that way. See that path?” He pointed to a faint track, little more than a wide spot where the grass was trampled into the mud. “That will take you there.” Zoe must have looked dubious, because he laughed. “Just walk straight in that direction, you’ll find it.”

  “Thanks.”

  The rain started about an hour later. It didn’t matter much. Zoe hadn’t taken off her rain gear in days. She was no judge of the distance they had traveled—the mud slowed them down—but she guessed they were probably halfway there. The high point of the trip was right after the rain began, when a group of capybaras (A herd? A pack? Zoe wasn’t quite sure what to call them) crossed their path about a hundred feet ahead. There were maybe a dozen of them, adults and babies, and the two women stopped, transfixed. The largest was roughly the size of an overweight golden retriever, the smallest the size of a housecat. They snuffled their way across the path, looking like nothing so much as long-legged guinea pigs. Well, considering the rain, very large, long-legged, wet guinea pigs.

  Once they had vanished into the taller grass, Ana laughed. “All right, that might have been worth the trip.”

  It was just getting on to late afternoon when they got to the village, a collection of half a dozen huts. Perhaps a mile farther on stood a sprawling, magnificent house. Zoe tried not to dwell too long on what it must be like to live in a thatched roof hut in sight of a mansion.

  They found Tia Yana sitting outside a hut, weaving grasses in an elaborate pattern. Zoe read the lines of pain on her face, and between that and the protruding lump on her belly she could almost make a diagnosis from here. Tia Yana’s color wasn’t bad, and she stood to greet them with relative ease.

  “Doctora,” she said, then went on in what Zoe had come to recognize as Puinave. She glanced at Ana, who shrugged. Damn it. It took a few moments to find a villager who spoke both Spanish and Puinave, a woman roughly Zoe’s age.

  Zoe did a quick exam without pulling out her equipment, checking Tia Yana’s pulse, temperature—her belly was as tender as Zoe’d expected, and she didn’t like the way Tia Yana was breathing. It was difficult to tell for sure in this heat, but Zoe thought she might be developing a fever. “May we come in? I’d like to take a closer look at you.”

  The four women crowded into Tia Yana’s hut. It was made of rough boards and a thatched roof. The floor was little more than planks laid over the worst of the mud. Tia Yana sat patiently while Zoe and Ana unpacked a few things from their crate. Zoe’s arms were sore from carrying it all this way, but now she was grateful she had.

  Tia Yana’s blood pressure was much too low, and her pulse was racing. Zoe looked at the way her face got paler when she moved. “The pain gets bad sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s gotten better,” Tia Yana insisted. “It’s just this,” she said, indicating where her belly was so distended.

  “Tia Yana, you have what’s called an umbilical hernia, a little hole in the muscles of your belly.” Zoe gestured to the swelling in her abdomen. “This means that part of your organs have come through that hole. Obviously, it’s causing you a lot of pain, but it can also make you very sick.” She waited for the translation.

  Tia Yana’s eyes widened and she said something. “She wants to know what you can do,” the translator said.

  “Well, you need to have surgery as soon as possible,” Zoe said. “We don’t have the facilities to do it in Inírida safely, but we can arrange to transport you over to Puerto Ayacucho.”

  She waited while they conferred. Finally the translator sighed and shook her head. “She says she would rather die at home than in a strange place. I can’t change her mind.”

  “Please explain to her that the risk of her dying in surgery is very, very low,” Zoe said. “It will take away the pain and make her feel better.”

  “She still says no.”

  Zoe ran through the few remaining options she had left. “All right. Let us do the very least we can then. I can do something about the swelling, and we might be able to keep it from coming back for a little while. It will help with the pain. But it won’t heal her.” It was a gruesome prospect—she’d have to basically push the woman’s insides back through the hernial opening—and if sepsis had already set in, it wouldn’t do much to extend her life. But at least some of her pain would be relieved.

  The woman nodded. “She says to do what you can do.”

  As she worked, Zoe kept talking. “I know you don’t want to go to the hospital, but if we can get you there quickly, we can make the pain go away completely, and fix what’s wrong. Then you can come back home. Ramon came to get us for you. He was very worried. You have other grandchildren besides him, I’m sure? Wouldn’t they want you to be well and happy?”

  Tia Yana was quiet, wincing only when Zoe pushed too hard on her belly. Finally she said, “The cost—”

  “We’ll make sure that’s covered,” Zoe said. Public health care was available in Colombia, but there were so many other costs here: the transportation, all of the extras involved in being away from home. “That’s what we do.” She was wavering, and Zoe took advantage of it to make plans. She had the sat phone and could call the clinic. Jacira might be able to arrange an airlift out of here to the hospital. The only question was could they do it soon enough . . .

  “Yes, all right,” Tia Yana said. “I’ll go.”

  Zoe grabbed the bulky phone from her pack.

  ***

  With the steady trickle of tourists looking to explore the Orinoco river basin, no one looked twice at Lee buying supplies for a trip up the river and into the jungle. He already missed his old frame pack from his Marine days, but the replacement he bought would serve. He bought everything he thought he might need. There were a few things he never traveled without and had with him: the Glock 9MM, his boot knife. The boots were his own, and most of the clothes. He’d initially packed for Inírida planning for some rough travel, but nothing this extreme.

  He wasn’t surprised he’d been able to get the final go-ahead from Wishnevsky. Keeping a team of aid workers safe was a good enough reason as far as the U.S. government was concerned, regardless of his personal involvement. Truthfully, there was a certain sense of benign neglect toward most of the South American operation these days. Focusing attention on the Middle East was much sexier, much more likely to gain press attention and Congressional funding.

  There was just one thing he needed to do before he headed out into the middle of nowhere. Calling his family seemed appropriate, but the last thing he wanted was to listen
to his mother worry. Calling his brother Lucas was always a crapshoot, especially when he was on tour. Not as much of a crapshoot as it had been in the bad old days; now that Lucas was clean and sober, the worst Lee could do was catch him asleep. There was one person he knew he could call in the middle of the afternoon and not worry about waking them up or worrying them.

  He dialed and the phone rang three times. Just as he thought it was going to go to voice mail, he heard a fumbling answer, a muttered, “Damn it,” followed by a crisply British, “Hello, Gwen Tennison.” In the background he heard men yelling at each other to move, and the general rumble of barely controlled chaos.

  “Gwen, hey.”

  Her tone softened to something less business-like. “Lee! How are you? Wait, where are you? Is everything all right?” A clatter interrupted her, followed by more shouts. “Oh bloody hell. Let me step outside.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “I should be asking you where you are.” He moved around his hotel room, checking to make sure he’d put everything in his pack.

  “Denver, two nights this time,” she said, the background noise quieting. “Maureen said you were in South America. Are you?”

  “Yeah, Colombia. And I’m fine.” He tucked the phone against his ear with his shoulder so he could rifle through his half-zipped frame pack. “Listen, I’m going to be out of cell range for a little while. Shouldn’t be more than a few days, but I didn’t want anyone to worry.”

  “Ah, and you’re too much of a coward to call your mother and tell her.” He could hear the grin in Gwen’s voice.

  “And I figured your fiancé was still asleep.”

  “He’s probably awake by now.” Her voice softened again. “You really should talk to him, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. I will, when I get back.” He rummaged to the bottom of the pack. Extra shirts, extra cargo pants—as much as he’d wanted to buy camouflage, being mistaken for a soldier out there seemed the worst possible option—extra socks . . .