TWENTY.
Aurora said, "I think we got a problem."
I heaved a cardboard box of canned spinach into the boat, pushed it snug against a twenty-gallon bottle of water. It was all we could salvage from the cave. What a great meal that was going to make.
"What"s that?"
A high-pitched whistling noise split the air. She held up her index finger: Exhibit A, Your Honor. Across the water, two Bolivian warships chugged toward us. Half a dozen more approached on the horizon. I felt like a deer crossing a highway at rush hour, doomed to watch death approach, unable to look away.
The explosion roared in my ears. The sand beneath my feet shifted sideways and I fell to my knees. Pebbles rained on our heads. A crater gaped just outside the cave.
"Where"s Victor?" I shouted.
"Gone back for his laptop!"
Another whistling noise overhead. This is no time to sit around waiting to die, I told myself. Revenge waits for no man.
"Get down!"
We threw ourselves face first on the beach. The explosion was louder this time. The sand trembled against my body. A boulder the size of a basketball landed next to my head. My ears rang. I got up on my hands and knees, peered over the top of the beach. The cave had collapsed.
Aurora took hold of the gunwale. "Get the boat in the water!"
Our legs churned sand until the icy water covered our knees. I looked back. The houses nearest the cave were in ruins. "The f.u.c.k is Victor?"
"There he is!" She pointed.
He ran toward us, his combover flopping at his shoulder, laptop under his arm. A third explosion destroyed half the village, blew him flat on his stomach, next to the pile of bodies. The laptop flew from his grip, smashed against the wall of a surviving house. He picked himself up, clawed at the innards of the computer.
"Come on!" I shouted.
Victor held up the hard drive, stumbled down the beach, through the water and dove into the boat. I tugged on the motor until it woke, and we roared away from sh.o.r.e. More sh.e.l.ls whistled toward the mountain. Houses the volunteers had labored for months to build now disappeared in puffs of splinters. The medical clinic vanished. The pile of bodies evaporated. Cadaverous parts rained around us, plopping in the water beside us, flecking us with bits of toasted gore. I lowered my head against the wind, aimed the boat for the southern sh.o.r.e of the lake.
"They"re sh.e.l.ling Peru, for chrissakes. They start the war without us? Did the bomb at the mine go off early?"
"They"re not attacking Peru," Victor said. "They"re attacking us."
"What for? Why do they want to kill us?" Aurora asked.
"Same reason they killed Pitt. Same reason they killed your boyfriend." Victor hurled the hard drive into the lake, and slumped into the bottom of the boat. "Michael failed in his mission. Now they have to make sure no one gets out alive." The spray soaked his combover. He lifted the wad of hair and plastered it to his scalp, thick strands of clotted gray, like rotting coils of intestines.
"Hang on," I said, one hand on the tiller. "Those are Bolivian ships. What are you saying, the Bolivians are working for the CIA?"
"Precisely!"
"But I thought the CIA was trying to steal the altiplano from the Bolivians!"
Victor shrugged, eyes half-closed. "Don"t underestimate the CIA. Probably told the Bolivians we"re terrorists or something, get them to do their dirty work." He slumped lower into the freezing water at the bottom of the boat.
"Figure it out later," Aurora said. "Right now, where are we going?"
I kicked Victor"s foot. "Good question!"
He shook his head, as though waking from a nightmare. All those dead bodies. I hoped the shock would wear off soon.
"Puno!" he said finally. Puno was the Peruvian border town, just opposite Copacabana on the Bolivian side.
"But there"s police in Puno," Aurora said.
"Peruvian police," I said.
"Peru, Bolivia, doesn"t matter. They"re all against us." Victor pushed himself up against the bucking gunwale. "Just outside Puno." He pointed. "There. See those trees?"
A tight copse of scrubby pines cl.u.s.tered next to a red barn. A giant green peace sign adorned the side of the building. I adjusted our course. We crashed across the waves, propelled by two hundred and ten horses. More sh.e.l.ls obliterated all trace of human habitation at the ashram. Machine-gun fire cackled and flashed in the distance, aimed at us, but the trace rounds fell into the lake hundreds of meters away.
"What"s there?"
"Transportation," he shouted. Then added, "You know, you"re lucky you got off the island alive. If you"d stayed, they"d have killed you for sure!"
The ships were closing the distance rapidly. I aimed the boat for the beach at full throttle. At the last moment I cut the engine. "Hold on!"
The boat threw itself onto the beach. Holding on was useless. I hurtled through the air, shoulder-planted myself into the beach, got a mouthful of sand for my trouble.
"Everyone alright?" Aurora asked.
"Tasty," I said, tonguing the grit that lodged itself between my teeth.
Victor trudged up the sand to the building. "This way."
He slid open the main door of the barn. The smell of manure was overpowering. Light filtered in through slats in the walls, reflecting off the dust motes. Half-dried llama abortions hung from the rafters. The unlucky llama mothers spat at us from their stalls. Aurora shuffled toward one the color of dirty coal, stroked its mangy fur.
"You look hungry," she cooed. "Yes you do. Who feeds you, huh? Who feeds you?"
My eyes adjusted. Parked in the back corner stood a van covered in burlap tarp. I put my hand overhead and smacked the roof of the vehicle with my open palm. It rang hollow. I said, "Thought you said you had a jeep?"
Victor stuck his hands into a pile of llama manure, ma.s.saged it with his fingers. "Katherine has it," he said.
"I thought you said she left. And what are you doing?" I asked.
He straightened up, a set of car keys dangling in his s.h.i.t-covered hands. Strode across the sawdust-scattered floor. Held the keys in my face. "She did. Is there a problem?"
Aurora waved a hand between our faces. "Yo. Guys. Who"s Katherine?"
Victor and I glared at each other. I spoke first.
"Ex-wife."
"Wife."
She bit her lip. "I see..."
Victor yanked the tarp off the van. A miasma of llama dander fogged the air. I coughed and sneezed. Put a finger to each nostril and emptied it onto the floor. Wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve. One of the van"s rear windows was missing. The others were covered with black cloth. Llama fetuses festooned the interior. It was the same van, I realized. The van they"d kidnapped me in. Victor hefted a bale of hay from behind the back wheels.
"So where"s she gone?" I asked.
"Katherine?"
"No, the teddy bear I lost when I was twelve."
Victor panted for breath. At four thousand meters, every movement was an exertion. He said, "We"ve got another place. Where we can hide. We were worried something like this might happen."
"Which is...where?" I asked.
He wiped his hands on the dirty tarp. "Forgive me if I do not tell you all my secrets on first acquaintance."
"You said that at the cave," I pointed out. "We"re no longer first acquaintances. More like second acquaintances. Now spill."
"Alas," he said, "nor on second acquaintance either."
"Let"s just go," Aurora said.
"Can"t." Victor got in the van, started the motor. "It"s in the mountains. Need a jeep to get there."
"Fine," I said. "You two go. Just drop me off at the bus station on the way."
"The bus station?" he said. "What do you want to go there for?"
I raised my eyebrows. "Take a bus?" I said. "You go wherever you want. I"m heading back to Lima."
"You can"t do that," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because they"ll kill you."
"Fine with me," I said. "As long as I kill one man first."
An explosion outside rattled the building. Bats in the rafters squealed, thundered out of the barn in a cloud of flapping wings, splattering us with guano.
"They"re sh.e.l.ling us," Victor shouted. "Come on!"
Aurora got in and straddled the gear stick. "So where are we going then?" she asked.
I hopped in beside her and slammed the door. "As long as it"s near a bus stop, I don"t care."
Victor reached between her thighs, reversed out of the barn. "I know a guy. In La Paz. Get us a jeep."
"But how are we going to cross the border?" Aurora shouted over the roar of the engine. "Won"t they be looking for us?"
Victor ground the gears, his fist in her crotch. He flung the van around, facing the lake. "You never crossed this border before?"
"Crossed it last week. Why?"
"You weren"t paying much attention, then."
An explosion shattered the remaining rear window. Splinters of wood and bits of llama, both fresh and dried, hailed down on the windshield. I looked back. The barn no longer existed. Victor spun the wheels, surged onto the gravel road that ran along the edge of the lake.
Aurora said, "They"re not joking, are they? They really want to kill us."
"It"s not a "they,"" I shouted. "It"s a him. One man."
"Yeah? Who"s that?"
"Ambo."
"Who"s Ambo?"
Victor braked hard, throwing us against our seatbelts, ending conversation. Aurora braced her hands against the dash. Victor hunched over the steering wheel. He counted to ten out loud, then lurched forward. An explosion shook the van, made us fishtail on the pitted gravel road.
The bombardment continued. Victor braked at random intervals, accelerated for a few seconds, slowed, advanced. Explosions ripped craters behind us, ahead of us, around us. Each time Victor edged around a crater, I closed my eyes, convinced the gunners would finally get it right, consoling myself that I would disappear in a puff of painless mitochondria.
An explosion tipped the van sideways onto two wheels, and Victor fought to bring it back to earth. Another shattered the side window, splashing my lap with shards of gla.s.s. I picked fragments from my cheek. Don"t let me die yet, I begged the earth. I"ve got one thing left to do.
"Who"s Ambo?" Aurora asked again.
"The man I intend to kill."
Aurora said, "So you guys in or aren"t you?"
We sat in line at the border, a long string of trucks ahead of us. The lakeside gravel road had finally curved inland and mounted a paved highway. We had joined a caravan of trucks and buses heading for the Bolivian border. With any luck I should be able to grab a westbound bus at the border post.
"In?" I asked.
"Well," she said, "we have a choice." She turned to Victor. "Don"t we."
Victor rested his hands on the steering wheel, his chin on his knuckles. "I"m for it."
"For what?" I asked.
"Stop the war."
I clucked my tongue. "How do you suggest we do that?"