Angel Eyes (27 page)

They encountered animals next: chickens, pigs, goats, enough to feed several hundred people. Then they saw the beginning of the compound. Russell, crouched beside Tori, whispered, "Jesus Christ, this isn't a factory, it's a goddamned city!" They counted a dozen long houses-no doubt dormitories-made of corrugated tin. Beyond, the jungle had been cleared to the south to make room for an airstrip. A Twin Otter airplane sat on the runway, being refueled.

As they continued to move around the clearing's perimeter, they came upon shedlike warehouses storing drums of acetone, aviation fuel, red gasoline, ether: the essentials of refining coca into cocaine, and of transporting it out of the llano negro. Farther along, three rows of massive generators hunkered in a huge shed cooled by the shade of a grove of trees. Other buildings housed washing machines, shower facilities, mess tables to accommodate a division. They found the lab itself, a long, low structure with a zinc roof. They moved on until they had identified every structure in the clearing.

The entire compound was dominated by the cloyingly sweet stench of "cooking" cocaine, a combination of ether and cocahydrochloride, which created its own kind of pernicious industrial pollution over this bizarre and scarifying jungle city.

"What the hell have we stumbled onto?" Estilo breathed. "This is more than we bargained for, Tori. The size of this place. . . You'd need a couple of army regiments to close it down."

"Maybe," Tori said. "Maybe not."

She led them back the way they had come. Twice they had to stop, melt into the jungle as guards in Jeeps thundered by, semiautomatic rifles at the ready. They were not soldiers, but they had the bearing of army-trained personnel.

Tori reentered one of the warehouses, checked the contents more carefully. When she returned to where the others were

waiting, she said, "In any case, there's nothing more we can do now. Darkness is our greatest ally out here."

In the belly of the black jungle, Russell took the first watch. Tori and Estilo sat together, their backs against the bole of an enormous tree. Birds called to each other through the maze of tree branches, and the whir of flying insects was incessant.

Tori and Estilo passed a canteen back and forth, taking only sips at a time. They ate some concentrated food. Estilo put his head back, closed his eyes. "A long long time ago, when I was a little boy," he said, "I found a cat in the jungle. He was sick-you could see he had no flesh over his rib cage, and one eye didn't work right. But, my God, he was a magnificent fighter. I sat and watched him methodically attack, kill, and eat a seven-foot adder so poisonous I wouldn't have gotten within ten paces of it. When he was through eating, he licked his paws and, mewing, walked over to me. I sat still. His eyes watched mine, and I think that if I had made any move at all he would have attacked me.

"But I didn't, and he didn't, and so we became friends." Estilo shrugged. "For many years he was my only friend. My family lived with other German emigres, and I hated them, with their stiff, formal ways, their arrogance of superiority. It was funny; they assumed that their superiority stemmed from genetics, but I knew the Argentines better than they did, and I knew what deference the Germans were given was bought with their stolen Nazi blood money."

Estilo turned and spat into the humid black earth. "One day the cat was gone, just like that. I found him that night in a back alley near my house. His neck had been broken. A swastika had been painted on his forehead, and then I knew who had killed him. There was a set of twins who lived in the house next to mine. They were bullies in school and in the neighborhood. They always stood by one another, so no one challenged them.

"I knew they had killed my cat, but I did nothing to let them know I knew. I decided to study them, and after a while it became clear to me that while they always provided a united front to the kids at school, when they were alone together-or thought they were-there was an intense rivalry between them. I was convinced that I had found their weak spot, but how to exploit it?

"It happened that the twins were both wild over one girl. She was a flirt, and liked both of them, or at least enjoyed the attention they gave her. Over the course of the next several months I secretly contrived to become her friend. She wasn't very good in mathematics and I undertook to tutor her.

"While I did so I drew her out so that she spoke about the twins. When she had given me enough intimate information about them, I used her to plant stories about how each of them was secretly trying to undercut the other in school, at home, with her. As I was certain she would, she passed on these stories. It did not matter that they were false; I knew the truth of the twins' rivalry, so the stories were believed.

"I set one twin against the other, until their enmity destroyed their connection, their love for one another. I drove them apart. In the end they became business rivals, and have spent their lives trying to bankrupt one another."

For a time there was silence in me jungle, the drip of moisture off the foliage, the whir and whine of insects, an animal call in the distance.

Tori wondered why Estilo had told her that chilling story. It occurred to her after a time that what he had been speaking about was not, strictly speaking, a cat-but rather loyalty, trust, friendship, and love. She recalled their talk on the telephone when she had still been in Mall Central, and she realized that this was as close as he could come to telling her how much he missed his friend, Ariel Solares.

Night in the llano negro was absolute. There was no moon, but illumination was provided by the factory's powerful arc lights. It was eerie to be deep in the jungle, and to see everything in terms of the powder-white sodium lights. There were no colors, no grays, only utter black and stalk white.

Russell went with Tori into the warehouse. He said, "I'm not sure this is a good idea."

"It doesn't matter," Tori said, crouching down by the side of a barrel of acetone.

"I'm the commander in the field," Russell pointed out.

"You're nothing," Tori said. "You want to be a commander, go ahead. But you've got no one to command."

There was a small silence. Then he crouched down beside her. ''I still think this is far too dangerous. We could all die."

"We could all have died in Cruz's copter, if the pilot had crashed," Tori said. "The idea is not to make a mistake." She nodded, held out a length of cord. "Cut this for me, will you?''

Russell did as she asked, and Tori dipped the cord into the acetone. She looped it around the barrel and over to the one next to it that contained ether. She opened the barrel. Then she backed up, trailing the cord behind her.

"Ready?"

"Not by a long shot," Russell said, watching her light the end of the acetone-soaked cord. Then they got out of there.

The string of explosions began twenty seconds later. The three of them set out on the run, through the confusion of the compound, the screaming of the Jeeps' tires, the shouts of the personnel.

They had their Uzi assault rifles at the ready, but they made it to the lab without having to fire them. With the entire warehouse going up, no one was interested in them. Yet. This was a shut-ended situation, because the explosions would surely bring the army out of its Apocalypse Now torpor, and those in command surely would begin instituting a building-by-building search of the compound as soon as the post-percussion fire was under control.

Tori estimated they had five minutes, any more would be stretching it.

They hit the lab at once, smashing in the door, hearing bursts of semiautomatic fire and answering with their Uzis. Six guards went down in a hail of bullets, shards of glass, wood, and metal. A dozen lab workers stood cringing with their hands on their heads. The chemical stench was almost overpowering, even though the line of windows at the back of the lab was open.

Tori posted Estilo at the open doorway, where he could cover the workers while she and Russell roamed up and down the aisles. Zinc-topped trestle tables were filled with huge metal buckets of cured cocaine, but all the ''cooking" was being done in vats outside. This was the end product.

On another table plastic bags were being filled with refined coke. "There's something odd here," Tori said.

At that moment Estilo came up. Keeping his eye on the workers, he said, "Did you take a look at the guards?"

Tori shook her head. "No time."

"They're all Japanese."

"Japanese?" Russell went over to where two of the guards were sprawled. He turned one over, looked at his face. "Japanese," he confirmed. Then he pulled back the man's sleeve. "Yakuza. What's this all about?"

"Protecting their investment?" Estilo offered.

Tori didn't think so. She took a look at the irizumi, the body tattoos on the man. She saw from the intricacy of the irizumi that this man was an underboss. He had been very powerful. That wasn't the way the Japanese Yakuza worked. The underbosses did not like to be so far from home. He'd be here only for the most vital of reasons. Coke was coke. He could just as easily have checked it at his end of the pipeline, or sent a trusted underling here to make certain of the quality. Then what was he doing in the middle of nowhere? What was so important—

Estilo gave a shout, then opened up with his Uzi. A worker who had drawn a pistol was thrown backward against the zinc-topped table where he had been stuffing cocaine into the plastic bags. As he collapsed, two of the ten-kilo bags fell to the floor. One burst open, and Tori made a sound deep in her throat.

She and Russell went over to the opened bag. Within the coke, something dark was just visible. Using the tip of her knife blade, Tori pushed aside the white powder.

"What the hell is that?" Estilo said.

"A soft cell," Russell said.

"What?"

Tori said, "It's a method of smuggling, unusual but invariably effective. It takes a convoluted brain to think of it. Contraband inside an altogether different type of contraband." She had uncovered a glassine tube. It was filled with pellets. They were of a metal that was almost black, almost totally without shine.

"What are they?" Russell said almost to himself. He took the glassine envelope, hefted it. "Heavy."

Tori was already slitting open the second ten-kilo bag. In its center, hidden by the powder, was an identical glassine envelope filled with the same metallic pellets.

"This must be why the Japanese are here," she said.

"This isn't about cocaine smuggling at all." Russell was staring at the pellets.

"No."

''But what is it about?''

At that moment Estilo said, "They're coming."

"Shit!'' Estilo shouted at the workers, herded them out of the lab building. He took a look into the compound. "The goddamned army's arrived."

Russell looked at Tori. "Now we've had it," he said.

Tori said, "Take the pellets. Let's get going."

Gunfire began, and Estilo jumped away from the doorway, began to return the fire.

"Forget that way," Tori said. "Use the windows! When you get out, head for the airstrip.''

They climbed onto me trestle tables, launched themselves through the windows. They emerged high up on the corrugated tin wall, but the underbrush cushioned their fell.

Immediately, more firing started, and the foliage around them began to fly apart. Estilo was nicked in the fleshy part of his arm, shouted a curse in German, pulled Russell backward to safety behind a tree.

There were shouts, and Tori moved in, Estilo and Russell behind her, fanning out, firing in short, accurate bursts.

Then they were through the hastily thrown-up cordon of guards, racing away from the compound, toward me airstrip where the Twin Otter waited, gleaming in the are lights like an oasis in the blackness of the night.

They were halfway to the airstrip when the firing began again. A Jeep was careening out of the compound, heading toward them in a vector that would cut them off from the runway. The driver gunned the engine, and the two soldiers in back readied a machine gun on a swivel mount bolted to the side of the Jeep.

"Christ," Russell said.

"Keep going!" Tori called. She stopped, began to fire her Uzi with the blunt shock jammed hard against her left side. The Jeep did not veer toward her as she had wanted it to, but the machine gun swiveled in her direction. It began to fire. With her right hand Tori pulled the pin on a phosphorus grenade tied to the bandolier she wore across her chest. She ripped the grenade free, lofted it toward the Jeep.

The driver saw it, pulled hard on the wheel. The Jeep screamed, skittered on the rutted dirt track, lurched, bounced, came down just as the grenade made contact. The white-green explosion peeled back the nearside fender, impaled the wheel on hot metal, tore into the engine housing.

The Jeep bucked, shot upward, passing vertical, crashed down on its top. No one moved underneath its bulk. Flames began to lick upward, then the ammunition ignited.

Ducking the flying debris, Tori ran in a zigzag pattern, heading toward the airstrip where the others had gone. And ran right

into a pair of soldiers who had burst at a full run from the underbrush surrounding the back of the lab.

One hit the point of her jaw with the stock of his machine pistol, the other kicked her legs out from under her. She fell to the ground, and one of the soldiers smashed the toe of his boot into her stomach. Tori doubled over, gasping for air, struggling for equilibrium.

Then she was hauled over on her back and one of the soldiers placed the muzzle of his pistol against the side of her head. His sweat dripped onto her forehead, into her eyes. He stunk from cordite and male sweat.

He grinned at her, and she could see the gaps between his teeth. "Adios, puta," he said.

Tori heard the crack of the pistol and she jerked. But when she looked up, she saw the soldier with a stupefied expression on his face. Blood drooled from the center of his forehead. Then he toppled out of her line of vision, and she rolled into the second soldier, who had lifted his machine pistol.