CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was three days to New Year’s. Three days to find out who was here and what they were up to. What could be easier?

Phil knocked once and pushed open my door. “C’mon, partner, time to run.”

“It’s got to be Monday,” I said. “Monday in hell.”

“Isn’t there someplace we have to check out?”

“You mean the place in the bush?”

“Yeah. Kelly went into the city for something, which means we’ve got the morning to ourselves. You’re supposed to be the smart one, what do you think?”

“I’m the smart one, huh?”

“That’s what I’ve been told.” Phil yawned, letting me see his molars. “So far, I haven’t seen it myself.”

I didn’t bring up that first-night drunk, or that maybe I was as skeptical about my intelligence as anyone. But I did bring up Cooper. “I know I asked you this before, but how well do you know him?”

“I’d trust him with my life,” Phil said, “which is more than I can say for you. All I know about you is you’re good at picking up women.”

“Fair enough.”

Cooper was already on the beach, stretching his hamstrings and delts and traps and whatever else he felt a need to stretch. I blinked a few times in the bright dawn, stretching my eyelids for a hard day’s labor. Every other muscle in my body hurt too much to move, and what didn’t ache burned, itched, or throbbed. I was enduring, as stoically as I could, the scratches, welts, and stings of the natural world, as well as the drubbing I’d been given by Panama’s finest and the right cross I’d been too slow to duck. I was beginning to think I wouldn’t get out of this place alive.

Cooper looked up from his leg stretches. “What’s eating you?”

“I want to run another route today, is that all right?”

Phil was impatient and in a bad mood. “Let’s get moving. Another minute of this and I’m going to kill somebody.”

“Lead on, Monkeyman,” Cooper said.

The three of us took off at an easy pace. I knew the direction I had to go and, with the sun in its spot, and whatever magnetic magic there is in our human skulls that give some of us a sense of direction, I knew we would soon intersect with a path that would take us to a road, across a river, and on to the urban warfare site the satellite had picked up in the jungle. And, of course, I got lost.

After going in the wrong direction for twenty minutes, I stopped and took my bearings again.

Cooper raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

Phil and I argued about where we were, where we were going, and how best to get there. I studied the map in my head, then the sunlight, and then the map again. While Phil was kneeling by a slow-moving stream, a long-legged rodent emerged from the underbrush, stopped, and looked at us. Satisfied we were either harmless or that he could outrun us, the creature sipped water from the stream. He was so close Phil could have swallowed him.

When he was gone, Phil said, “What the fuck was that?”

“It was an agouti,” I said, “a member of the guinea pig family.”

“An agouti? How did you know that?”

“I read a book, Phil.”

“Maybe I’ll give that a try,” he said.

“I have an idea,” I said. “If we’re looking for a river, we should be able to find it if we follow this stream.”

“That’s your idea?”

“Yeah. What do you think?”

Phil looked unimpressed. “What? You read that in a book, too?”

“What’s so important about this place you’re trying to get to?” Cooper asked.

“I won’t know until I get there.”

“I hope they have a Starbucks,” he said, and started off along the stream. Phil and I followed. It wasn’t easy, and there were times we had to detour around a thick tangle of vine, but we kept going in its general direction until it joined a river so muddy it looked thick enough to plow.

“Which way?” Coop said.

I looked up and down stream, trying to match the twists in the river to the bends recorded by the satellite. I took a guess. “This way,” I said, and pointed upstream.

We hadn’t gone more than a mile when we saw the footbridge, one rope strung across the current, with two other ropes, shoulder high, strung for balance. We crossed over, carefully, the bridge bobbing and swaying under our weight. The river below us was swift and carried trees and bushes torn roughly from an upstream bank.

The path was easy to follow now, and clear. Five- and six-feet wide in places, and well used, it made the next three miles an easy run compared to the struggle of crashing through the foliage alongside the stream. Near the crest of a hill the path widened and spread into what looked like a staging area, with a helicopter LZ among the ruts and the tire tracks of large trucks. Beyond the LZ, streets ran through the first plywood-and-cement buildings of an empty village. The three of us walked down what looked like the main street, wide enough for parades. The buildings on either side were just plywood fronts, like a Hollywood set. The deeper we went, the more detailed the buildings got, with doors and window frames.

“What the hell is this?”

“What’s it look like, Coop?”

“It looks like an urban assault course.”

Phil bent down and picked up a spent brass casing. “We got live fire.” He tossed it to Coop.

“AKs. We don’t train with AKs.”

“Maybe we don’t,” I said, “but maybe the students from the hotel do.”

“Why would they train with different weapons than the ones we use at the range?”

“I don’t know.”

Cooper chewed on the inside of his lip, turning the brass casing around in his hand. He looked up and said, “Something doesn’t smell right.”

It was time to give Cooper a way out. “That’s why we’re here,” I said. “Whatever it is stinks all the way up to Washington.”

Cooper looked from me to Phil and back to me again. “Both of you?”

Phil nodded.

“Anyone else at the hotel besides you two?”

“There were. They’re both dead,” I said. I explained about the satellite photos and the anonymous guests, and how something big was set to go down on New Year’s Eve. “I’m supposed to learn who is staying at the hotel, if they’re bankrolling something bigger than just training their own personal security forces, and what they’re using this place for, a place that even most of the American instructors don’t know about. Once I know these things, I can go home,” I said. “The question for you is, do you want a piece of this, because if you don’t, Phil and I will understand.”

Phil said, “That’s right, Coop. You can go back to the hotel and nobody will say shit about it.”

“No,” Cooper said. “I’m good. Just tell me something.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re the good guys, right?”

Phil pointed a finger at me and said, “He is. I’m not.”

Cooper turned it over in his head a few times and said, “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

We split up. Phil went left, Cooper and I went right. The satellites had seen just a small corner of the complex. Most of the streets and structures were hidden beneath triple canopy, impossible to see by air, even by helicopter.

“How’d they know about this place?”

“Infrared shots of night training,” I said. “That’s when they started asking questions, after seeing the thermals.”

“Why can’t they use Predators to snap pics of the hotel?”

“They’re all in Iraq and Afghanistan. Panama isn’t exactly a high priority.”

Coop and I walked between the bullet-pocked plywood, made haunted-house creepy by the darkness of the bush and the silence of the jungle around us.

“No wildlife,” Coop whispered.

“It’s all been chased away by the gunfire,” I said, touching a splintered bullet hole.

We turned a corner. Cooper said, “Now this is weird.”

There was no question that we were in a simulated city street with alleys and walkways, open plazas, several burned-out cars and a bus, its windows and tires long gone, its shell blackened. Steel silhouettes stood on each corner, on springs, their surfaces dented by live rounds. I touched one. “Whoever this is supposed to be looks mighty dead.”

“Mighty dead,” Coop said.

Phil came up from our left and our nerves were so stretched that if we’d been armed we might have shot him.

“You guys are jumpy as cats,” he said.

“What’d you find?”

“I walked the perimeter. They’re using Claymores, RPGs, frags. I even found a launcher for a Stinger.”

Cooper stood, his hands on his hips, and turned around in a full circle. That discomforting feeling of having been here before got under his skin and gave him an itch he couldn’t scratch. “Déjà vu like a mother. This seem familiar to you, Phil?”

Phil looked around at the dummy structures, with their vacant windows and doors. “Looks like a street,” he said and shrugged. “Narrow, like a slum.”

Cooper shook his head. “No, not a slum. It could be the old part of the city. What do you think?” Without waiting to hear Phil’s answer, Coop walked farther on, trying to match where he was with a place he’d recently been. “This is Casco Viejo, I’m sure of it.” He jogged past plywood shattered by live fire, jumped over man-sized divots in the dirt caused by hand grenades, and ran around more burned-out shells of automobiles, their charred steel perforated by bullet holes. Phil and I ran after him, catching him as he stood looking up at a single, large structure at the center of the street. Here there were doors, kicked in so many times that the impressions of boots were a permanent part of the grain. Inside were complete rooms, and a staircase, the walls shredded by bullet holes and smudged by smoke and tear-gas grenades.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” Coop said.

“What? What is it?” I asked. “Where are we supposed to be?”

Cooper walked around the open room, the trees overhead speckling the walls with shifting bits of sunlight.

“I was just here. Just two days ago.”

“Where? What is this place?”

Cooper stopped, his hands on his hips, staring up at the balcony. “It’s the Presidential Palace,” Cooper said. “They’re training men to storm the Presidential Palace.”