Her hand went to the stone at her neck again, then left.
She moved another hundred yards downstream, measuring the distance with paces, using the position of the sun to verify her direction. She then tailed off into the woods. She found a vantage point and settled in again. She covered herself with leaves and branches and kept her back to a rocky slope.
More time went by. An intense exhaustion began to grip her, then possessed her completely. She closed her eyes, unable to keep them open. Her pistol was in her hand, on her lap. It must have been four in the afternoon when she drifted off.
She opened her eyes again a few hours later. There was still some daylight and some of her camouflage had been pulled away.
She blinked awake, startled, as someone grabbed the pistol from her. The dying sunlight of the day cast severe shadows among the trees. But she did see the large heavy silhouettes of three men, all in military green and brown camouflage-style uniforms, with beige coiled braids on the right side. All three had automatic rifles.
One of the rifles was pointed straight at her face, inches away. A second man poked her in the shoulder with the nose of his rifle. The third one held her Beretta. He tucked it into his belt. The leader appeared to be about thirty. The two younger men were barely out of their teens. They stared at her as if she had arrived from outer space.
“¡Levántese!” the rifleman ordered. Get up.
Slowly, raising her hands in the air in surrender, she stood.
SEVENTY-THREE
¿Quién es?” one of them asked. Who are you?
She assessed quickly. On their chests they wore nameplates, on their lapels and shoulders, they wore ranks. Militias didn’t do that. On their heads, they wore the floppy hats of regular army units assigned to the mountains.
They were soldiers of the Venezuelan army. The leader was a trim comandante named Ramírez, equivalent to a major. His two men appeared to be privates.
The leader held her at gunpoint and one of the others took her knife away. Then they started patting her down, a frisk and a grope at the same time. Across her body, across her breasts, between her legs. She cringed and pushed back. In return, the groper held her arm tightly, shook her and threatened her with worse if she didn’t cooperate.
She refused to answer them.
The indignities continued. One of the men pushed his hand within her T-shirt and continued to explore. She pulled back angrily, throwing an elbow.
“¡Párense!” she snapped. Stop! “Soy norteamericana,” she said. “I was in the village when it was raided. I fled.”
Ramírez looked her in the eye. The other two studied her up and down.
“¿Cuál pueblito?” the comandante asked. What village?
“Barranco Lajoya.”
They looked at each other.
“Barranco Lajoya was destroyed,” he said in Spanish. “There was a massacre.”
She felt her spirits plummet, her heart going with them. Her friends. The missionaries. More than ever she was conscious of the pendant she wore around her neck. But was it doing anything, protecting anyone? Where was God when she needed God?
“How bad was it? The massacre?” she asked.
“If you’re an American, why is your Spanish so good?” Ramírez asked, ignoring the question. “Americans don’t speak Spanish without an accent.”
“My mother was mexicana. What happened to the village? I was with the missionaries. How bad was the attack?”
The soldiers relaxed very slightly. “Prove that you’re American,” the leader said.
She reached slowly to the side pocket of her shorts. She pulled out her passport and handed it to them.
One of the younger soldiers took it and gave it to the major. They kept their guns trained on her. She had no chance to run, she knew. She would have been cut down within a few feet if they chose to kill her.
Major Ramírez looked at the passport and looked at her. Then he examined the passport again and stared at Alex’s face. He closed the passport and handed it back to her. He told his private to return her weapons.
“Venga con nostros,” the captain said. Come with us. We’re very sorry.
They led her through several thickets, the young soldiers hacking their way with machetes. They came to a path and fell in with other soldiers. Other people from the village had been rounded up too. The sad tragic trek through the forest took half an hour. Then they came to a clearing and then what remained of Barranco Lajoya.
Nothing in her experience could have prepared Alex for what she saw, not even the violence and obscenities from her experience in Ukraine.
There were bodies still lying on the ground, men and women and children, awaiting body bags. The straw roofs of several buildings had been torn off, cement and concrete buildings had been smashed. The raiding party had shown no mercy. Walls were down on almost all buildings, the generator had been smashed into oblivion, and the muddy unpaved streets of the town were strewn with the shattered remnants of the buildings. The village looked as if it had been bombed.
The soldiers led Alex into a small littered clearing behind another hut, and there on the floor were several sheets and canvas coverings. It was a makeshift morgue. There were so many bodies that Alex didn’t think to count them.
Major Ramírez removed his hat and led Alex to a viewing area, which was no different from any other area except it was a small cleared patch of ground.
The comandante looked at her with sorrow in his eyes. Then he reached down to one of the sheets.
She braced herself. Ramírez lifted the first of several gray blankets so that she could see. Against her will, against all the training she had received at the FBI Academy, against even the horror of what she had witnessed in Kiev, she gasped and retched.
On the ground were the bullet smashed corpses of the six missionaries who had served in this village, four men and two women. These were the people she had known personally and worked with. Their bodies were caked in blood, their limbs and heads twisted at impossible angles and folded back together.
Some of their faces had been hammered into pulp by the force of the bullets. One woman’s head, the one closest to Alex, had star fractures in both eyes and a lower jaw blown off. One man’s upper torso had been hit by so many bullets that the soldiers had had to tie it closed with rope and canvas.
The executions, she could tell, had taken place at close range and without the slightest sign of mercy. This was the earthly reward that these kind people had received for trying to bring some good to this small tough patch of the world.
Alex stared at the obscenity before her. She wondered: had the invaders come for the missionaries? Or could she have been the ultimate target? But if the raiders had known she was among them, why had she been the only foreigner to defend herself and to have escaped?
Plenty of questions. No answers.
“Ya está bien,” she said softly to Ramírez. “Más que suficiente.” More than enough. Enough for the moment. Enough for a lifetime.
Ramírez gave a terse signal to his soldiers. They covered the bodies again. Alex turned away and left the room. A few feet away, she sat down on the ground, too shocked to even cry. Insects buzzed around her and the heat was relentless. She no longer cared.
On the morning of the next day, she oversaw the simple funerals of the people of the village. A military chaplain presided. The dead were interred beneath wooden crosses on a mountainside that overlooked the valley. The missionaries who had lived with them were buried with them and, presumably, would remain with them for eternity. How long, Alex wondered, would the ghosts of those slain haunt this place?