A guard was left to watch over the women. He squatted, unconcerned, with his shotgun across his knees. He didn’t expect trouble and the women weren’t about to give him any. He mindlessly prodded in an ear and then examined the findings on the tip of his little finger. He flicked and tried the other ear.
His companions disappeared around the far side of the plane and Irene could hear them working inside the cargo-hold. It took them over fifteen minutes to reappear. They struggled under the weight of heavy backpacks but there was no denying the look of satisfaction on their faces. The leader took one last wistful look at the women but he clearly had his priorities and the men drifted off among the trees again, as silently as they had arrived.
Irene waited a full two minutes. She couldn’t seem to get her chest to stop heaving and she was aware of the sounds of the restless girls. Irene turned on them. “Don’t anyone move a fucking muscle,” she swore. “Not until we’re sure they’ve got.”
The compound went still and Irene waited, straining her ears for approaching footsteps. But all she heard were the return of the birds and their cheery calls from the pine-boughs. Another five minutes passed before Irene finally got to her feet. She looked around the compound, took note of the leaking bodies, the infirmary and the Pigpen. There was work to be done.
“Linda. Get those women out of the pen and feed them. Give them what’s left in the stew-pot if they’ll eat it, or onions. They’ll need their strength. Tomorrow we leave this place. Tomorrow we hike down the mountainside.”
Her decisive words were met with a ripple of approval from the girls. Irene realized the women needed leadership and hard work to survive and, by God, she was going to give it to them.
“Bev? Go up to the service area and gather anything that’s edible. Even the powered coffee creamer. Natalie and Erin? Drag Ashwin’s body over next to the others and start heaping firewood on the remains. We’ll burn ’em. Melissa? Gather up every blanket you can find. Air them out, fold and stack them. Sissy? Follow me. And the rest of you forage for food; mushrooms, fungus, tubers, onions. Gather up everything you can find, wash it and get it ready for packing.”
The women scurried to fulfill her orders with the surge of satisfaction that came with the realization that, finally, they were taking charge of their own lives. Irene had saved them once, and she would damned well do it again.
“Sissy? I don’t know what’s left of Brad but you of all people are better prepared to deal with what we’ll find. Sorry to dump on you.”
Sissy nodded stoically. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she returned without conviction and forced an empty smile.
Irene squeezed her shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get it over with.”
They had torn Brad’s left foot off. The foot that Ricky had so carefully stitched back to Brad’s stump. The foot that Sissy had fought so valiantly to save. The Colombians had ripped it off and stuffed it, toes down, into Brad’s throat. Two centavo notes had been rolled up, a bill forced into each nostril.
“For the love of God,” Sissy hissed, the tears clogging her eyelashes, “they suffocated him with his own foot.”
Irene shook herself. She could barely comprehend what she was seeing but couldn’t afford the time to dwell on it. “Help me bind him in a blanket,” she said. “I don’t want any of the others to see this.”
They stripped the blanket from the opposite cot and lay it across the floor, then with a heave, they rolled Brad into it and secured the ends with electrical wire.
“Good,” Irene stretched her back muscles. “Go get Natalie and Erin. Drag Brad over next to the others and go help with the firewood.”
Once Sissy had run to find the other girls, Irene took a breath to steady herself. There was one last nagging detail before she rallied her girls: She needed to see the remains of Pamela and Alex and come to final terms with what she found. It would fall to her to explain to Rob and Pamela’s parents what had happened here, up on the side of a mountain. The responsibility fell to her shoulders, hers alone, and would weigh heavily in the future months.
She rounded the corner of the infirmary and stepped behind the plane.
Alex, still proud, was stretched across the wooden trestle. The gleaming knives were laid out in preparation for the separating of joints and the severing of buttocks and breasts for the roasting fire; a gruesome undertaking that had been interrupted with the arrival of the Colombians. With a heave, Irene realized she would need another blanket and had to arrange for a burial.
She looked for Pamela.
At first she didn’t see the girl. Irene walked further into the woods before finding the heap of fresh earth. She looked closely and saw the sheet of aluminum set into the ground. It was a lid. A lid to a cool-box Ashwin had constructed to preserve the fresh meat. Irene slid the aluminum back. Inside she found the choice body parts that Ashwin had been saving for himself and his friends.
Irene dropped the lid back into place. “I’m so sorry, Pamela,” she broke, the tears rolling down her cheeks. And with her bare hands, Irene shoveled the earth back into place, sealing Pamela inside the metal box with a thick layer of soil.
Her task completed, Irene made her way back to the plane. She saw the cargo door hanging open and recalled the Colombians laden with heavy backpacks. She had to wonder. And maybe she would find cargo blankets inside that would provide shelter and ground-cloths.
Irene clambered up over the sill and rolled onto the floor of the cargo-hold. It was a long, sausage-shaped compartment with a floor that followed the general contours of the plane’s fuselage. There were no windows and Irene waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. She spotted two cargo blankets and with a sense of achievement, folded them loosely and tossed them to the ground.
She stood stooped over in the confined space, and looked about for other treasures. There wasn’t much and she feared that Ashwin and his men had been there before her.
Then she saw the loose panel.
Irene knew enough about a DC-9 to know something was out of place. Where there should have been a solid, aluminum bulkhead, there was only a flimsy sheet of metal, hanging by a couple of retaining screws. She moved closer to see.
What she discovered was a secret compartment, the size of a small closet, and the tell-tail traces of white power told her what it had been used for: Smuggling cocaine. The compartment had been tightly packed when she crashed, she guessed, and the Colombian drug lords had sent a posse of killers to get the shipment back. She recalled the heavy backpacks the men hauled from the aircraft.
Irene pulled at the hanging panel for a better look. There was a bundle of old clothes stashed inside. Irene frowned, squinting in the dim light. She started, grasped a breath and with a hand to her mouth, stepped back. Hanz stared up with vacant eyes. He had been dead a very long time.
As the sun broke over the mountains to the east, Irene readied her girls for a trek down the mountain. She planned to follow the river. It would provide drinking water and hopefully fish and maybe even freshwater shrimp. They had made rucksacks from blankets and each girl carried onions and tubers along with spare blankets.
Irene wasn’t fooling herself into thinking it was going to be an easy walk, but the river had to lead somewhere. There would be a village or maybe a town. People needed water and the river was a vast natural resource. It provided for indigenous Indians and it would provide for her girls. She believed that. If they had to walk twenty miles or five-hundred, they would end up somewhere. And somewhere was better than here.
Her ears pricked.
It was a far off throb, but unmistakable. The low lazy drone of a prop-driven aircraft and it was headed toward their spot on the river bank. Irene thought her heart would burst. The other girls heard it too and looked excitedly toward the sky. God. She hadn’t imagined it. After all this time, someone was coming for them. The girls were pointing. A dot had appeared against the mountainside and was growing larger.
It was an old Grumman Goose. The ungainly amphibious aircraft lumbered along, barely a hundred feet above the water, but flew unerringly to where the girls danced, waving their arms about their heads. Irene didn’t know how, but the Goose was zeroed-in on their exact location. As it flew overhead it waggled its wings and the girls screamed in delight. It was a joyful sound and Irene struggled to remember the last time she had heard such unbridled happiness.
The Goose rounded up, slowed, and dropped somewhat gracefully to the water. The hull touched, throwing up a curtain of spray that shone with rainbow colors in the morning sun. On the Grumman’s side was painted the giant panda of the World Wildlife Federation.
The plane taxied close in. Men deployed an inflatable raft from a cargo door and paddled to shore.
“Major George Finley.” The man walked up the shale and saluted. “Might I be of some assistance?” He spoke with a crisp British accent and wore a beret with green shirt and trousers.
Irene looked up at him and grinned like an idiot. She couldn’t think of a solitary thing to say.
“Roselli’s my benefactor, as you might have guessed.” Major Finley sat on a log back at the compound and poked at the soil with a stick. “I was sent to get you out. And there was a rather lucrative shipment– to be collected.”
“Cocaine,” Irene said. “I know about it. The shipment was here, in a compartment built into the cargo-hold, but the Colombians arrived yesterday. I’m sorry. It’s gone. They hauled it off in backpacks.”
Finley was resigned. “Ah well, nothing to be done. My orders are to bring you and your girls out. I get the feeling the cocaine was secondary anyway. You and Roselli close? Not that it’s any of my business.”
Irene thought of the crime-boss a moment. “Just friends I guess. I did him a good turn once and he’s an honorable man. He has returned the favor, that’s all. A life for a life. The slate’s clean.”
Finley nodded and had the decency not to pry. “Get your girl’s ready. I’ll fly you to Caracas and leave you at the airport. You’ll have to make your own way from there. The old Goose has its limitations.”
“Thank you,” Irene said. “Caracas will be fine.”
Major Finley got smartly to his feet. “Oh don’t thank me, Captain. I’m being well paid.” He bowed slightly. “But trust me, the pleasure of your company would be payment enough.”
His sincerity brought the color to Irene’s cheeks.
“Are you ready?”
“Just one last thing.” Irene got to her feet and walked to the men’s shelter. The camera was hanging from a support. She plucked it up and swung it by its strap.
Irene held Ashwin’s camera above the funeral pyre. She hesitated a moment, feeling the heat singe the hairs on the back of her hand. She dropped it. The camera fell, throwing up a cloud of cinders and Irene stepped back to watch the glowing filaments lift toward the sky. One by one, they died. Jesus.
“Irene!” Major Finley called out, “it’s time.”
Irene shook herself. “Yes,” she called back. Then prayed: Time to leave this place, to the gray winter sky and the snow. Time to leave the memories. I love you guys. I’m so sorry.
“I’m ready.”