Jungle Up, page 15
Even though I was especially grumpy, I said, “Good morning, Camila.” Then, turning to Vern, I asked, “Where’s Diego?”
“Not sure,” Vern said. “He took off into the jungle a few minutes ago.”
I nodded.
“How are you feeling?” Vern asked, reaching out and touching my shoulder. “Does your testicle hurt?”
I took a sip of coffee and then said, “If by hurt, you mean, does it feel like someone put it in a walnut cracker and then lit it on fire, then yes, it does hurt.”
“Is it swollen?”
“It is extremely swollen, thank you for asking.”
Vern started chuckling uncontrollably, a Gatling gun of laughter. It was almost worth going through something so terrible if it could bring someone else so much joy.
Almost.
Mercifully, Diego emerged from the jungle, and I wasn’t forced to answer any more of Vern’s inquiries.
One of Diego’s hands was full of leaves, and Vern asked, “What have you got there, chief?”
“Matico.” He nodded at me and said, “For his bites.”
Diego pulled a small mortar and pestle from his pack and began grinding the leaves into a paste.
I knew from my many years dealing with Lacy’s multiple sclerosis that the Amazon jungle was the world’s largest pharmacy. Two of Lacy’s seven medications and nearly 25 percent of all Western pharmaceuticals were derived from rainforest materials. But the kicker was, only 1 percent of all rainforest materials had been researched. It was mind boggling to think of how many different possible cures and treatments were living, breathing, and dying around us this instant.
Diego explained that the leaves of the Matico plant had pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory properties. Most people boiled the leaves in tea to relieve body aches and coughs, but it also worked as a topical paste, and it should help relieve the intense itching and burning of my bites.
Once Diego was finished, he waved me over and began daubing the paste—a gooey light green—on my many ant bites. I was tempted to tell him I could do it myself, but he was intent on doing it for me. That said, he did let me apply it to my testículo myself.
There was a bit leftover at the end, and Vern took it and rubbed it into his knee.
Ten minutes later, my bites and testicle feeling surprisingly better, I pulled the Garmin inReach from my pack and turned it on.
My eyes opened wide, and I said, “I have service.”
≈
“How’s the signal?” Vern asked.
“Three out of four bars,” I said with a grin.
I quickly opened up the messenger app and texted Lacy.
Hey Lace . . . Phone just activated . . . Any word from Gina?
I sent the message, imagining it sneaking through the tall canopy, shooting upward twenty thousand miles to low earth orbit, bouncing off who knows how many of the sixty-six Iridium satellites, then shooting down to France. I wasn’t sure how long I should expect to wait for a response, and while I waited, I checked the weather on the phone.
It was currently seventy-nine degrees with 63 percent humidity, which aligned with how muggy it felt.
I was checking out several more of the phone’s functions when a message came in.
Tommy!! I’ve been trying to text you for two days. Was starting to get worried. No word from Gina. But Mike Gallow called yesterday with some good news. He was able to track down the owner and last-known coordinates of the phone Gina called you on. I had him text the details. I’ll copy and paste his message and send it to you.
I glanced up and said to both Vern and Diego, “My contact was able to get the coordinates of the sat phone that Gina called me on.”
Diego gave me a thumbs up, and Vern’s eyebrows raised slightly under his maroon cap.
A moment later, another message came in. It was a copy-and-pasted text from Mike Gallow.
Hey, Prescott. Here’s what I found. The sat-phone number is from the GlobalSat network. Registered to a J. Gonzales. Paid for a yearlong subscription with a prepaid Visa. Dead end. Only two calls were made. First call was August 3rd, 2:03 p.m. Just outside a town in Brazil called Rio Branco. Call lasted six minutes. The receiving number was a Bolivian area code. I called that number. No answer. Didn’t have much cooperation from Entel (Bolivian cell company) trying to track down the owner. Second call was to you on August 9th at 7:03 p.m. Lasted 17 seconds. Coordinates registered are: -10.402809, -66.481275. Phone hasn’t had an active signal since. Good luck. You owe me one.
Yeah, I did.
A big one.
Vern was standing near my left shoulder, and he pulled out his own GPS and said, “Read those coordinates out to me.”
I did.
Vern plotted them with his GPS, then turned the device toward me. There was a route going from our current location to the location where Gina’s call had originated.
It was 8.3 miles away.
≈
With Diego not having to constantly stop to search for evidence of Gina and her abductors’ trail, we made better time, covering the 8.3 miles in under six hours.
We approached cautiously as we neared the exact coordinates. Vern grabbed one of the automatic rifles, and I grabbed the shotgun.
Vern pushed aside a large branch, then stopped. He asked, “Do you smell that?”
I did. It was like sitting in an overly chlorinated hot tub ten feet from a Conoco station. “Yeah,” I said. “What is it?”
“Chemicals. I’m guessing there’s a drug lab up ahead. Probably where Gina’s call came from.”
I raced forward, gun out in front of me, and crashed through five feet of thick brush. The jungle opened up slightly, and there was what amounted to a ten-foot-square above-ground pool made from thick plastic sheeting. Surrounding the jungle “pool” were five multicolored plastic drums, and thirty feet beyond them was a small structure constructed of bamboo poles and a sagging gray tarp.
“Looks abandoned,” Vern said, sidling up next to me.
I nodded.
Gina had been here seven days ago on August 9, but she was gone now.
Vern and I padded twenty feet forward to the rectangular pool. The black plastic sheeting was elevated using tree stumps, small boulders, and several small bamboo poles. The sheeting angled downward, and there was a thin brown layer of film on top. Pockets of brown water had collected across its surface.
“It’s a coca tank,” Vern said.
I nodded at the large drums and said, “Those the chemicals we smell?”
He nodded and said, “Chlorine, gasoline, sulfuric acid, and ammonia.”
I had a rudimentary knowledge of cocaine from my time as a police officer, but most of my insights had to do with the powdered form that found its way to the street. I asked, “So how do they make it?”
Vern spent the next minute giving me a crash course on how to make cocaine in the jungle.
He said, “First you start with the leaf of the coca plant. I’d be willing to bet within half a mile of here there’s a decent amount of coca being grown. Judging by the size of this tank, I’d say between four to six acres.
“After they harvest the leaves and bring them here—I’m not sure exactly why they picked this spot; there’s probably a river somewhere nearby where they could float in all the chemicals—they dump the leaves into the vat, then soak them in chlorine and gasoline. The cocaine separates from the leaves and rises to the top of the tank. They skim the top, pour it into those large drums, and add sulfuric acid and ammonia. The cocaine separates further, then they filter this through a cloth. What’s left, the residue, is heated, and it crystallizes into a solid cocaine base. The process takes three or four days.”
I asked, “Then they make it into a powder?”
“Not here. That takes a hydraulic press. There’s probably a spot within a day’s travel from here where they have a more permanent hub set up to do the final processing, and then they ship it out across the border.”
I tried to put this all in the context of Gina. She’d been here a week ago, but for how long? Did she and her captors come here, spend three or four days making the cocaine base, then leave? Did they head to this processing center that Vern theorized was close by? Did we just miss them, or had they been gone for several days already?
“What are you thinking?” Vern asked.
“I’m trying to figure out where Gina fits into all this. Did they come here to make the drugs? To steal drugs? To take the drugs somewhere else?”
“Yeah, I wish I had an answer for you.”
“Can you tell how long it’s been since they made the cocaine here?”
“I might be able to make a guess.” Vern stepped over the wall of plastic and into the coca tank.
“Thomas!”
I turned.
It was Diego. He and Carlos were inspecting the structure behind the tank. Juan Pablo stood outside the structure, holding Camila.
“Come see!” Diego said, waving his hand.
Vern stepped out of the tank, and the two of us made our way to the small hut. On the ground surrounding the hut were empty water bottles, cans of orange Fanta, and hundreds of cigarette butts.
Inside the hut was a makeshift table made of two pieces of plywood lying on top of three plastic drums. Centering the table was an ivory paste, which I guessed was a batch of cocaine base that had been softened by the jungle moisture.
But that wasn’t why Diego called me over.
There was blood spatter covering half of the table, two of the plastic drums, and a large portion of the tarp roof.
“That’s a lot of blood,” Vern said from behind me.
I was following the blood spatter down the table and onto the far-right blue drum when something on the ground caught my eye. Two yellow leaves were right next to the drum, yet both somehow escaped the blood spatter. I kicked the leaves aside with my boot and squinted at the object hidden beneath. It was almost completely submerged in the soft earth. I leaned down and wiggled it out of the ground, then I dusted it off against my chest. The screen was cracked, and it was covered in a few droplets of dried blood.
I turned the phone over and read the brand name on the back.
GlobalSat.
22
jungle
august 9, 5:47 p.m.
days since abduction: 4
“One sixty-two over one eleven,” Gina said, loosening the cuff on Bill’s arm. “That’s pretty high.” The reading put him in stage 2 hypertension. If his blood pressure got much higher, he could be at immediate risk of a stroke or a heart attack.
Bill—that’s what her patient had told her his name was, anyway—grimaced and said, “Yeah, that is.”
“Do you take medication for high blood pressure?”
“I’ve been on a few different ACE inhibitors over the years.”
An angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor relaxes blood vessels and decreases blood pressure. It is usually one of the first lines of defense against hypertension.
“You don’t have any with you?”
He shook his head. “I stopped taking them a couple months back. They were making me too tired.”
“Better to be a little tired than a little dead.”
He huffed out a laugh.
When Bill had first started complaining of light-headedness, Gina thought he was probably dehydrated from the ten hours they’d hiked in the intense heat. Nearly his entire shirt was soaked through with sweat, and every few minutes he would need to take off his tinted glasses and wipe them free of the fog that had formed.
Thankfully, not long after Bill’s first stumbles, the jungle had opened slightly, and they had come across a raised black plastic tank and a small bamboo structure with a gray tarp. Gina overheard one of the soldiers say the words “laboratorio de drogas.” Drug lab.
Gina had assumed her abductors were narcotraffickers, but now she was certain.
They’d set up camp at the far end of the clearing, fifty meters from the tank. Gina had been changing the dressings on El Jefe’s head wound when one of the soldiers summoned her to come to Patrick and Bill’s tent and to bring her medical kit.
When Gina ducked inside the large tent, she found Patrick’s associate alone. He was sprawled out and looking flushed.
After giving Bill a thorough examination, it appeared the man’s symptoms stemmed from something more than a little dehydration. No, the man, whom Gina guessed to be in his midfifties, was simply in horrific shape. He was thirty pounds overweight, and he had the cardiovascular amplitude of a man whose idea of exercise was walking to the mailbox.
Gina said, “I would advise you to take it easy, but I don’t think that’s an option.”
“I’ll power through,” Bill said. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I was in pretty good shape at one point in my life.”
Gina raised her eyebrows.
“I used to bike a lot. Even thought about doing this two-hundred-mile race once.”
“What happened? Why didn’t you do it?” Gina was trying to extract as much information out of him as possible. In the three days she’d been traveling with the men, she’d gathered little more than the fact neither Patrick nor Bill spoke a lick of Spanish.
“Too much training,” Bill said. “It would have been too much time off work.”
“Got to bill those hours.”
Bill chuckled.
Gina was set to probe a little further, to ask him where the bike race was located, when she saw it. There was a backpack lying on its side, and one of the zippers was open. Gina squinted, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. Poking out through a small opening was the half-inch long nub of an antenna.
A satellite phone.
“Let me listen to your lungs again,” Gina said, pulling the stethoscope from around her neck and putting it in her ears.
Bill nodded, and Gina placed the chest piece against the front of his shirt. “Take a deep breath,” Gina instructed, though she was hardly listening.
After two breaths, she moved behind him. The backpack was four feet away. She pressed the chest piece to his back with one hand, and stretching backward with her opposite hand, she fumbled for the phone. Her fingers scraped at the half-inch antenna on her first try, and she said, “Okay, two more big breaths.”
Holding the chest piece with the tips of her fingers and stretching back with her hand until it felt like the tendons in her fingers would snap, she was able to get two fingers around the small antenna.
“One more big breath,” she said, sliding the phone toward her body and slipping it into the waistband of her shorts.
“Your lungs sound good,” Gina said, moving around to his front. “Have someone come get me if you start having chest pains.” She gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and said, “And try to get some sleep.”
“Sure thing, doc,” he said with a glimmer of a smile.
Gina ducked out of the tent, holding her shirt in place with one hand to make sure it didn’t ride up on her back and expose the top of the phone. The soldier who’d summoned her from her tent was hovering near the entrance and escorted her back to her tent at the edge of the brush. Gina noticed that the other four soldiers were gathering wood for a fire. Patrick was nowhere to be seen.
El Jefe was lying on his back, the last of the seven saline bags hanging from the collapsible IV stand. The man had spent the last two days on a gurney being carried by two soldiers (who switched out every half an hour), and his face and arms were covered in a light film of dirt. If he didn’t wake up in the next day and a half, Gina feared that without any more saline bags, his kidneys would begin to shut down.
Gina pulled the phone from her waist. She had no idea how long it would be until Bill or Patrick realized the phone was missing. The phone was a newer model of the same brand the WHO had used, and Gina powered it on.
It’d been a year since Gina had last made a telephone call, and it had been two years since she’d had a cellphone, but she had one number memorized.
She edged to one of the mesh windows and glanced out. The window was at a severe angle, but Gina could see four soldiers sitting around a now blazing fire. She assumed the fifth soldier was sitting outside her tent. Fortunately, he wasn’t the one who spoke English, so even if he overheard Gina speaking, he would think she was talking to her patient, which she’d done plenty of over the past three days.
Gina hunkered at the far back of the tent and pushed in the ten digits. She put the phone to her ear, but the call failed. She checked the connection.
No signal.
Although satellite phones could theoretically work anywhere on the planet, they needed a direct line of sight to space, and Gina knew the thick jungle canopy could interfere with the signal.
She waited a few minutes, then tried again.
Again, the call failed.
“Dammit,” she whispered, gritting her teeth.
She heard a noise and glanced out the mesh window.
Patrick was strolling back into camp from wherever he’d been. He would most likely go check on Bill, and then he would see the backpack and the missing phone and connect the dots.
Gina had to act now.
After she’d cleaned the wound on El Jefe’s head, the soldiers had confiscated her two scalpels and anything else sharp enough to be used as a weapon. Gina whipped her head around, looking for anything with an edge she could use. She grabbed her medical bag and sifted through the contents. She found nothing. Then she saw the stethoscope and blood pressure cuff she’d tossed aside after returning from checking on Bill.
Her eyes widened.
At the bottom of the ear tubes was a four-inch piece of slim metal that created the tension between the two sides.
The binaural spring.
In her residency, Gina had been replacing the spring on a stethoscope—it snapped around the ear tubes on both sides—when she’d cut her finger. The circular metal snaps had surprisingly sharp corners.
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