‘I want you to pilot the sub eastwards across the Caribbean Sea until you reach the Cayman Islands,’ el cocodrilo said with a feverish excitement clearly audible in his voice. ‘Then, you’ll head past Cuba and Jamaica and skirt around to the Dominican Republic, where you’ll be met at a secluded rendezvous point just off the coast, near Santo Domingo. Jorge will be given the co-ordinates for the sat nav, but you will be in charge of the vessel.’
Kneeling on the jungle floor by entrance to the cenote, the man held his hands behind his head, cowed by the sight of the pistol in el cocodrilo’s hand. Satisfied that the vessel was watertight and functioning, his captor had decided that the semi-submersible should be brought up from its hiding place, at last, loaded with contraband and launched on its maiden voyage with him in it.
‘You’re making a mistake, jefe,’ he said, squeezing his eyes shut to block out the sight of the weapon. ‘I’m no sailor. I might have built the thing, but I’m the last man you should have piloting it on the high seas. Honestly.’
The impact of the pistol against his temple stung, whipping his head off to the side at an awkward angle; the vertebrae in his neck responding with a nauseating crack. Knocking his glasses to the dusty ground. Suddenly, el cocodrilo was kneeling beside him. He could smell his breath – stale beer, cigars and the sweet, fatty smell of cured meat.
‘Listen, mecánico,’ he said. ‘It’s my fucking millions of dollars have gone into building this tub …’
In his peripheral vision, he could just about make out his captor’s mouth – a cruel, mean mouth with no discernible lips. His mahogany-tanned European skin, deeply etched with crow’s-feet, was blotched with deeper brown melanin spots on his cheekbones and forehead, testifying to too many years spent living in a climate to which he was genetically not well suited. El cocodrilo was an interloper, he reflected, and yet he had successfully embroidered himself in the fabric of the infamous Coba cartel. A successful schemer. A masterful manipulator. His realm was not just a few meth labs in the dense, sweaty tangle of the Yucatan jungle. This son of a bitch had the four corners of the world as his playground. So why was a cold-blooded monster with the international pretensions of a modern-day conquistador so hell-bent on prolonging his agony, when he could find much bigger, more entertaining sport elsewhere, he wondered?
‘So, if I say my mecánico will captain my sub’s maiden voyage, you’ll do it, or I’ll put a bullet in you – or worse.’
‘You couldn’t do worse. I’m your slave. And this is lunacy!’ he said. ‘You’re planning to overload it, so it’s going to sink anyway and kill everyone on board. That’s physics, jefe. And I don’t know how to chart the high seas.’ He shook his head vigorously, imagining being shut into the belly of the vessel he had designed and built by hand over a period of years. Already gripped by claustrophobia, he found he was gasping for breath in the searing heat like a drowning fish. ‘I know nothing about currents and tides or weather reports. Haven’t I done everything you asked?’ he asked, dimly aware of blood dripping from his temple to the jungle floor. ‘I built you a semi-submersible that works. But I wanted you to let me test it at depth. It’s still an unknown quantity beyond a few metres.’
El cocodrilo grabbed his chin and yanked his face upwards so that he was forced to look into those piercing blue eyes. Without the aid of the varifocal lenses in his spectacles, they were slightly fuzzy but no less terrifying. Eyes that delighted in the sight of human beings being eaten by the crocodiles he kept as pets.
‘You’ve done everything I’ve told you to,’ el cocodrilo said, ‘because if you hadn’t, I’d have killed you. And now, I’m telling you to pilot that fucking sub to the Dominican, so my meth can be loaded onto the cargo ship bound for Rotterdam in four days’ time.’
A thick forearm reached forwards and plucked his glasses from the ground, handing them back to him.
‘You’ll need these,’ Miguel said. Standing with his feet together, almost to attention, like a tubby, poorly trained soldier, el cocodrilo’s sidekick pointed to the crane that was perched by the entrance to the cenote. ‘Here she comes, jefe.’
El cocodrilo was on his feet, watching, as the twelve-metre-long semi-submersible was winched clear of the cenote entrance and hoisted into the air. The surrounding jungle swallowed the sound of the men shouting instructions to one another. This way. Take it higher. Left a bit.
Silently, he sent a prayer skywards beyond the green canopy to the perfect cobalt-blue of the cloudless Mexican sky that he be forgiven for the part he had been forced to play in the inevitable demise and even deaths of those innocents who succumbed to the lure of whatever poison el cocodrilo’s men brewed in the jungle. It had never been his intention to collaborate with murderous traffickers, but he was just one of hundreds of scientists who were eking out miserable half-lives in the jungles, deserts and mountains of Central America, having been kidnapped by gangs and forced into professional servitude in aid of the cartels’ drugs trade. There had only ever been one thought that had kept him going. Just the one precious thought of the one precious being, whose photo was concealed behind the back of his watch. He meditated on that photo now as the sub was lowered onto a trailer and towed into a road of sorts that had been hacked into the thicket.
A rifle in his back compelled him to stand.
‘Move it,’ Jorge said, kicking him in the ankles with heavy, dusty boots.
The musky smell of Jorge’s sweat was overpowering. He was a stocky barrel of a man with bulging upper arms covered in the obligatory tattoos and cropped black hair that was thick and perfectly straight like carpet. Quintessentially gang material. They all dressed the same in low-slung jeans and vests. They all acted the same, like cloned Rottweilers on steroids. The thought of being trapped below the sea for three days in a vessel that was effectively a floating sarcophagus with this stinking, hostile brute was unbearable. He said nothing, however.
‘And if you think you can take the easy way out of this by sinking that sub or trying to get us spotted by the coast guard in the hope that they’ll rescue your sorry ass,’ Jorge continued, ‘I’ll kill you with my own bare hands.’
‘Thanks for the handy suggestion,’ he said, quiet enough to go unheard.
Now, as they followed the sub’s trailer, pulled by mules across the rutted land, under cover of the jungle’s dense canopy, he contemplated how he might do exactly as Jorge had suggested. Get caught. It was the only way. Until now, he had had no opportunity whatsoever to contemplate escape. They had been watching him continually and he had had nothing but uninhabited wilderness and no water supply for miles around. But now … The risk of Jorge putting a bullet in him was high, but it was a calculated risk. How likely was it that one of these guys, when faced with the possibility of being caught red-handed by the Federales or coast guard, manning a sub that contained tonnes and tonnes of meth, would think first of saving his own skin and abandon that million-dollar tub before you could count uno, dos, tres? He allowed himself an almost imperceptible smile.
‘What are you so damned happy about?’ Jorge asked, poking him in the back with the sight of the rifle. Perhaps escaping this particular guard’s beady-eyed stare was going to prove more difficult than anticipated.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy. I’m looking forward to a change of scenery. That’s all.’
Beyond the trees, he knew there was a glorious Caribbean sunset. The jungle was suffused with a pink glow. But as the daylight started to fail, the mosquitoes buzzed and whined around him, landing on his sweat-slick skin where it was exposed. Lightning-quick will-o’-the-wisps that he could never slap away before they had already drunk their fill of his blood. The itching would be unbearable later. At least in the cartel’s secret compound, where he shared a shack with a kidnapped American chemist from San Diego, mosquito nets were provided for when darkness fell.
Three days in a boiling hot, poorly ventilated, overloaded sub with Jorge and arms and legs covered in mosquito bites, he thought. I must have been some son of a bitch in a previous life to deserve this torture. He wondered briefly if there was any mileage in praying to the skeletal figure of Santa Muerte, as the Mexican gang members did. Would she look kindly on him and help him to derail his journey along this particular route to the afterlife? Was that how these things worked?
Too bad he was no longer a religious man.
Even amid the cacophony of noise from the nocturnal jungle creatures as they came out to play and hunt, the growling of his empty stomach was audible. With sweat rolling off his emaciated frame at an unsustainable rate, his mouth had been dry and cracked at the edges for hours.
‘Drink,’ he said, his voice now little more than a croak.
‘Sure. Share mine.’ Jorge cracked open a new bottle of mineral water and drank thirstily until there were only one or two mouthfuls in the bottom. He grinned nastily. ‘Don’t take it all or I’ll cut your greedy tongue out.’
Being careful to take only one swig, his concentration lapsed momentarily. He tripped on the root of a wild tamarind tree. Landed heavily on his knees, yelping. Insects scuttled away into the undergrowth. He imagined that he saw the spotted pelt of a muscular jaguar, moving stealthily in the tropical thicket, only metres away. He envied it its power and liberty.
‘Get up, you useless piece of shit,’ Jorge said, thumping him in the shoulder with the butt of the rifle. ‘You want me to tell el cocodrilo that you’d sooner be pet food than captain his submarine?’
Shaking his head, he willed himself to stand tall, not wanting to show any emotional weakness. His pride and dignity were all he had left, after all. Though having shared a bucket as a latrine for years with the Texan chemist, there wasn’t even much left of that.
The procession presently started to head down a slope that had been cut into the otherwise flat terrain of the jungle. The rumble of traffic was audible some way off. He calculated that it must be highway 307 that ran the length of the coast. Naturally, they would have to cross that somehow to get from the jungle interior to the sea.
Deeper and deeper they went, until walls of soil and tree roots rose above them on either side. In the twilight, he could make out an arch – the entrance to a tunnel, jet-black where the remaining light of the day could not penetrate. The rumble of traffic grew progressively louder, shaking the excavated ground. He could hear miniature landslides of sandy soil hitting the ground as it was dislodged by the weight of some heavy goods vehicle, thundering its way along the highway from the south up to Cancun with its delivery of bananas or trafficked and desperate Mexicans and Guatemalans, hiding among produce, hoping to head across the Gulf of Mexico and into Florida under cover of darkness.
‘Is the tunnel safe?’ he asked Jorge. The scouts that led the group shone torches inside the underground path that danced in beams on the makeshift walls. ‘Every time a truck goes over, that’s a lot of weight to bear.’
‘How the fuck should I know, mecánico?’ Even in the murk of dusk, at least four metres below the floor of the jungle, he could see his guard’s disparaging sneer. ‘They’ve got plenty of dorks like you working for them. Maybe they got a tunnel genius or some shit to make it. You spend a couple of million dollars on a sub, you’re not going to take a chance on a tunnel collapsing on your head are you?’ He tutted. ‘And stop fucking asking questions or I’ll shove a snake in your pants when you’re sleeping, you smart ass.’
Contemplating their journey to the Dominican Republic, he wondered if Jorge slept deeply. Even a drug-fuelled pig like him would have to sleep at some point during the course of three days. Having designed the sub to evade radar, sonar and infrared detection, he would have to come up with some cunning way of scuppering the vessel’s invisibility, sabotaging the voyage by alerting the coast guard to their presence. It was the only way. Providing the damned thing didn’t take water on board first.
In the tunnel, he could barely see. Jorge took a torch out from the back pocket of his jeans and shone the harsh light into his face.
‘Don’t think you’re going to slip away while we’re down here. There’s nowhere to go, and Jorge’s got his eye on you.’ Jorge shone the torch onto his own face from his chin upwards, giving himself a ghoulish appearance, drawing attention to the black teardrops that had been tattooed on his lower eyelids. A card-carrying killer. Though he was already well aware of that. There were entry-level expectations when it came to the upper echelons of the Coba cartel.
Down there, the air smelled of soil, rotten foliage and decaying excreta from the animals who had instinctively worked out that this was a safe route to the other side of the highway. Water from the recent tropical rains had accumulated and now pooled at their feet, seeping into his ramshackle boots. Looking behind him, he did wonder if he could somehow backtrack and bolt for the jungle. But the excavated path was so narrow and enclosed by the high walls of earth that Jorge would have no trouble in picking him off with a well-aimed shot. Dust fell from the unsupported roof above. No props. Nothing to stop the entire thing from caving in. No engineer had cast an eye over this tunnel’s construction.
The falling dust turned to clumps of earth dropping onto his head as they reached what he guessed was the midway-point of the tunnel. The rumble of a truck in the distance grew louder, reverberating around the inexpertly dug thoroughfare.
‘Christ! It’s going to cave in,’ he shouted, realising that if the tunnel collapsed, it would cause a sinkhole in the highway. They would be crushed beneath an inevitable multiple pile-up of cars and trucks. ‘We need to run!’
‘Don’t talk crap,’ Jorge said.
His voice was all but drowned out by the deafening thunder of the truck directly above them. Earth and rocks started to fall in earnest as deadly hard rain.