She couldn"t even see it yet. The tall gra.s.s hid it. She moved her gun slowly, positioning its nose in the direction of the snake. She would have one shot to try to save her life, but if the bullet from her own gun blew her foot off, that would be akin to a death sentence out here, too.
A prayer kept repeating itself in her mind.
Oh, my Lord. Oh, my Lord. Protect me now if you ever have before! She was in tall gra.s.s so thick that she couldn"t see past her waist. A little breeze rustled the gra.s.s. The snake was still climbing her, staking her out, claiming her.
Alex guessed it might be four feet long because it was coiled around her from her ankle till past her knee, and she couldn"t feel the head or neck of it.
Then the gra.s.s moved slightly, and like a small dark ghost emerging from a pale green cloud, the head of the snake poked through, skin glimmering with scales, its small black eyes alive with menace, small black bifurcated tongue flickering in and out.
The rattler was a creature of horror and beauty at the same time. The head was silvery gray, and a row of diamond shaped markings with brown centers outlined in yellow spanned downward from the head to the body. Beyond it, as the gra.s.s moved and the snake advanced toward her upper body, its head lifted, Alex could see the tail, lightly striped with brown and yellow.
She gazed at its eyes, elliptical pupils centered by black irises. For a moment it opened its mouth slightly, showing the venomous fangs that could kill her as easily as a jungle fighter"s bullet.
The head was now about eighteen inches away from the nose of her pistol. It seemed to be looking her right in the eye, almost freezing her. The head continued forward. In the back of her mind, she suspected that it was instinctively going for her throat.
Closer.
It was now about a foot from the nose of her gun.
She figured she had one shot. Maybe two if the first one wasn"t a clean hit.
She steadied her wrists as best she could. There would be a kickback to the pistol, enough so that a second shot would be questionable.
The snake moved forward another inch or two, exploring. Then it stopped.
The tongue continued to flick.
She knew. It was ready to strike at her flesh, either her arm or her neck.
Now or never.
The heat pounded her, and the sweat rolled off her so furiously that she felt as if a fat person were lying on top of her.
A final prayer and ...
Now! She pulled the trigger.
The weapon erupted with a powerful bang.
The impact upon the snake"s head was instantaneous. The bullet took the snake"s head off with precision, smashing it into oblivion, leaving a writhing decapitated creature spasming and unraveling on her, spilling its reddish yellow guts onto her clothing. The rest of the snake"s upper body, the part that wasn"t coiled around her, flew backward toward the gra.s.s, the neck oozing with blood and intestines.
Alex felt the snake"s body go limp around her leg.
She felt a deep sickness in her stomach and wanted to vomit. But she fought back. She reached through the gra.s.s and grabbed the remains of the carca.s.s where it was wrapped around her leg. She pulled it off her and flung it away.
She slid forward.
Cautiously, she got to her feet. Both her legs were red and cross hatched from sc.r.a.pes. She gasped for her breath, breathing hard, the gun still in her hand at her side. She looked in every direction and saw no enemy. Maybe they had departed already. Many people had fled into the jungle, perhaps the attackers had given up and departed. She prayed that was the case.
She guessed the direction of one of the streams. She went five minutes through some heavy foliage, then heard the water. She reasoned that she was about three hundred yards downstream from where the women of Barranco Latoya were used to bathing.
The water there would be safe, she reasoned. And it might be a terrain she knew better than the attackers.
She found the stream. She holstered her gun. She picked a secluded place and removed her shoes and socks. She waded in and drank. Never had water felt so good, satisfied so deeply. She washed the cuts and sc.r.a.pes on her legs. The abrasions stung but the water soothed. She caught her breath. Then she washed her arms and her face.
She kept up her vigil. She saw no one else. No raiders, no survivors from the village. She wondered if she should creep closer to the village but reasoned that if any gunmen had been left behind, that"s what they would be looking for her to do. So she didn"t. She would maintain her plan to return at the next dawn.
She found some wild roots and berries that she knew to be edible. She had enough nourishment to sustain her. She was still in shock over what had happened, what she had seen, at having been under fire. But she was alive, rallying her spirit and still ready to fight back.
Her hand went to the stone at her neck again, then left.
She moved another hundred yards downstream, measuring the distance with paces, using the position of the sun to verify her direction. She then tailed off into the woods. She found a vantage point and settled in again. She covered herself with leaves and branches and kept her back to a rocky slope.
More time went by. An intense exhaustion began to grip her, then possessed her completely. She closed her eyes, unable to keep them open. Her pistol was in her hand, on her lap. It must have been four in the afternoon when she drifted off.
She opened her eyes again a few hours later. There was still some daylight and some of her camouflage had been pulled away.
She blinked awake, startled, as someone grabbed the pistol from her. The dying sunlight of the day cast severe shadows among the trees. But she did see the large heavy silhouettes of three men, all in military green and brown camouflage-style uniforms, with beige coiled braids on the right side. All three had automatic rifles.
One of the rifles was pointed straight at her face, inches away. A second man poked her in the shoulder with the nose of his rifle. The third one held her Beretta. He tucked it into his belt. The leader appeared to be about thirty. The two younger men were barely out of their teens. They stared at her as if she had arrived from outer s.p.a.ce.
"Levntese!" the rifleman ordered. Get up.
Slowly, raising her hands in the air in surrender, she stood.
SEVENTY-THREE.
Quien es?" one of them asked. Who are you?
She a.s.sessed quickly. On their chests they wore nameplates, on their lapels and shoulders, they wore ranks. Militias didn"t do that. On their heads, they wore the floppy hats of regular army units a.s.signed to the mountains.
They were soldiers of the Venezuelan army. The leader was a trim comandante named Ramrez, equivalent to a major. His two men appeared to be privates.
The leader held her at gunpoint and one of the others took her knife away. Then they started patting her down, a frisk and a grope at the same time. Across her body, across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, between her legs. She cringed and pushed back. In return, the groper held her arm tightly, shook her and threatened her with worse if she didn"t cooperate.
She refused to answer them.
The indignities continued. One of the men pushed his hand within her T-shirt and continued to explore. She pulled back angrily, throwing an elbow.
"Prense!" she snapped. Stop! "Soy norteamericana," she said. "I was in the village when it was raided. I fled."
Ramrez looked her in the eye. The other two studied her up and down.
"Cul pueblito?" the comandante asked. What village?
"Barranco Lajoya."
They looked at each other.
"Barranco Lajoya was destroyed," he said in Spanish. "There was a ma.s.sacre."
She felt her spirits plummet, her heart going with them. Her friends. The missionaries. More than ever she was conscious of the pendant she wore around her neck. But was it doing anything, protecting anyone? Where was G.o.d when she needed G.o.d?
"How bad was it? The ma.s.sacre?" she asked.
"If you"re an American, why is your Spanish so good?" Ramrez asked, ignoring the question. "Americans don"t speak Spanish without an accent."
"My mother was mexicana. What happened to the village? I was with the missionaries. How bad was the attack?"
The soldiers relaxed very slightly. "Prove that you"re American," the leader said.
She reached slowly to the side pocket of her shorts. She pulled out her pa.s.sport and handed it to them.
One of the younger soldiers took it and gave it to the major. They kept their guns trained on her. She had no chance to run, she knew. She would have been cut down within a few feet if they chose to kill her.
Major Ramrez looked at the pa.s.sport and looked at her. Then he examined the pa.s.sport again and stared at Alex"s face. He closed the pa.s.sport and handed it back to her. He told his private to return her weapons.
"Venga con nostros," the captain said. Come with us. We"re very sorry.
They led her through several thickets, the young soldiers hacking their way with machetes. They came to a path and fell in with other soldiers. Other people from the village had been rounded up too. The sad tragic trek through the forest took half an hour. Then they came to a clearing and then what remained of Barranco Lajoya.
Nothing in her experience could have prepared Alex for what she saw, not even the violence and obscenities from her experience in Ukraine.
There were bodies still lying on the ground, men and women and children, awaiting body bags. The straw roofs of several buildings had been torn off, cement and concrete buildings had been smashed. The raiding party had shown no mercy. Walls were down on almost all buildings, the generator had been smashed into oblivion, and the muddy unpaved streets of the town were strewn with the shattered remnants of the buildings. The village looked as if it had been bombed.
The soldiers led Alex into a small littered clearing behind another hut, and there on the floor were several sheets and canvas coverings. It was a makeshift morgue. There were so many bodies that Alex didn"t think to count them.
Major Ramrez removed his hat and led Alex to a viewing area, which was no different from any other area except it was a small cleared patch of ground.
The comandante looked at her with sorrow in his eyes. Then he reached down to one of the sheets.
She braced herself. Ramrez lifted the first of several gray blankets so that she could see. Against her will, against all the training she had received at the FBI Academy, against even the horror of what she had witnessed in Kiev, she gasped and retched.
On the ground were the bullet smashed corpses of the six missionaries who had served in this village, four men and two women. These were the people she had known personally and worked with. Their bodies were caked in blood, their limbs and heads twisted at impossible angles and folded back together.
Some of their faces had been hammered into pulp by the force of the bullets. One woman"s head, the one closest to Alex, had star fractures in both eyes and a lower jaw blown off. One man"s upper torso had been hit by so many bullets that the soldiers had had to tie it closed with rope and canvas.
The executions, she could tell, had taken place at close range and without the slightest sign of mercy. This was the earthly reward that these kind people had received for trying to bring some good to this small tough patch of the world.
Alex stared at the obscenity before her. She wondered: had the invaders come for the missionaries? Or could she have been the ultimate target? But if the raiders had known she was among them, why had she been the only foreigner to defend herself and to have escaped?
Plenty of questions. No answers.
"Ya est bien," she said softly to Ramrez. "Ms que suficiente." More than enough. Enough for the moment. Enough for a lifetime.
Ramrez gave a terse signal to his soldiers. They covered the bodies again. Alex turned away and left the room. A few feet away, she sat down on the ground, too shocked to even cry. Insects buzzed around her and the heat was relentless. She no longer cared.
On the morning of the next day, she oversaw the simple funerals of the people of the village. A military chaplain presided. The dead were interred beneath wooden crosses on a mountainside that overlooked the valley. The missionaries who had lived with them were buried with them and, presumably, would remain with them for eternity. How long, Alex wondered, would the ghosts of those slain haunt this place?
That afternoon, Alex watched as Venezuelan Red Cross workers came in and led a long march of survivors down the mountainside to waiting vans. The village was no more. The survivors were to be relocated.
That same evening, Major Ramrez appeared and spoke to her. "I have my further orders," he said. "You are to leave the country immediately."
"It"s not like I was planning to stay after what happened," she said sullenly.
"Your contact will find you in Caracas," he said.
"What contact?" she demanded.
"I only know my instructions," he said, "and I"ve just related them to you." He paused. "And if I were you," he said, "I would leave quickly, before the government of Venezuela changes its mind."
That evening before sunset, she returned to La Paragua and flew back to Caracas by army helicopter. Three soldiers accompanied her, obviously under orders, saying nothing, only staring. The personal items she had left at the hotel had been safely stored for her. She retrieved them easily upon her return to Caracas.
The horrors of Barranco Lajoya hung heavily on her. She phoned Joseph Collins in New York with the intention of relating what had happened. But word had already reached him. He inquired only about her safety. She a.s.sured him that the Venezuelan army had treated her properly.
They agreed to meet in New York as soon as possible. Then, that evening, she found a Methodist church not far from her hotel and spent time in prayer and meditation-seeking answers and guidance and not finding much of either-until an elderly pastor appeared and closed the doors to the church at midnight.
SEVENTY-FOUR.
Alex walked the few blocks back to her hotel from the church.
The blocks were quiet and shadowy, South American cities being lit at night nowhere as well as North American ones. She had her Beretta with her and examined every shadow as she approached it.
She returned safely to her hotel. But in her room, there was a man waiting, a visitor. She was not altogether shocked to see him. She had almost been expecting his reappearance. In the darkest corners of her mind, things were starting to fall into place, no matter how much she wished to reject the meaning of recent events.
"I wouldn"t get too comfortable here," the visitor said, standing as she entered her own room. "We have a long trip ahead of us."
"Go to h.e.l.l, Michael!" She glared at him and suppressed an even more violent and profane run of obscenities.
"No, really," Michael Cerny said evenly. "I know what you"ve been through. I know what you"re thinking. But we"re going to iron everything out by the end of the day."
"What I"m thinking is that there"s a black cloud following me around. And you"re it. I ought to shoot you."