"They seem to prefer the Pacific side," Rooke had explained in Curaçao, eight hours and a lifetime ago, speaking over the house telephone from room 22. "Caribbean side's too easy for the radar boys to track. But once you're in the jungle it makes no difference anyway, because you won't exist. The head trainer calls himself Emmanuel."
"It isn't even a letter on the map," Rooke had said. "The place is called Cerro Fabrega, but Roper prefers to call it Faberge."
Roper had taken off his sleep mask and was looking at his watch as if checking the airline's punctuality. They were in free-fall over zero. The red-and-white posts of a helicopter pad were sucking them downward into the well of a dark forest. Armed men in battle gear were staring up at them.
And so indeed had Roper explained before going aboard the
The pilot cut his engines. A squat Hispanic man in jungle uniform trotted forward to receive them. Beyond him, Jonathan saw six well-camouflaged bunkers, guarded by men in pairs who must have had orders not to leave the shadow of the trees.
"Hullo, Manny," Roper shouted as he hopped cheerfully onto the tarmac. "Starving. You remember Sandy? What's for lunch?"
* * *
They processed cautiously down the jungle path, Roper leading and the stubby colonel chattering to him as they went, turning to him with all his thick body at once, lifting his cupped hands to grapple him each time he made a point. Close behind them walked Langbourne, who had slipped into a low-kneed jungle march; then came the training staff. Jonathan recognised the two loose-limbed Englishmen who had appeared at Meister's calling themselves Forbes and Lubbock and known to Roper as the Brussels boys. Then came two look-alike Americans with gingery hair, deep in converse with a flaxen man called Olaf. After them came Frisky and two Frenchmen he evidently knew from other lives. And behind Frisky came Jonathan and Tabby and a boy called Fernandez, with a scarred face and only two fingers on one hand. If we were in Ireland, I'd reckon you were bomb disposal, thought Jonathan. The scream of birds was deafening. The heat scalded them each time they entered sunlight.
"We are in most steep country of Panama, please," said Fernandez in a soft enthusiastic voice. "Nobody can walk this place. We have three-thousand-meter-high, very steep hill, all jungle, no road, no path. Terebeno farmers come, they burn tree, grow plantain one time, go away. No terror."
"Great," said Jonathan politely.
A moment's confusion, which Tabby was for once quicker than Jonathan to solve. "Soil, Ferdie," he corrected him kindly. "Not
"Terebeno farmers very sad people, Mr. Thomas. Once they fight everybody. Now they must marry to tribe they do not like."
Jonathan made sympathetic noises.
"We say we are prospector, Mr. Thomas, sir. We say we look oil. We say we look gold. We say we look
From beyond the jungle wall Jonathan heard a burst of machine gun fire, followed by the dry smack of a grenade. Then a moment's silence before the babel of the jungle returned. That's how it used to be in Ireland, he remembered: after a bang, the old noises held their breath until it was safe to speak again. The vegetation closed over them, and he was in the tunnel at Crystal. Trumpet-shaped white flowers, dragonflies and yellow butterflies brushed against him. He remembered a morning when Jed wore a yellow blouse and touched him with her eyes.
He was returned to time present by a detachment of troops jogging past him down the hill at light-infantry speed, sweating under the weight of shoulder-held rocket launchers, rockets and machetes. Their leader was a boy with dead blue eyes and a bushwhacker's hat. But the eyes of his Spanish Indian troops were fixed in angry pain on the way ahead, so that all Jonathan knew of them as they scurried past was the praying exhaustion of their camouflage-dappled faces and the crosses round their necks and the smell of sweat and mud-soaked uniforms.
