The old man spoke to her in a language Crocker didn’t understand, then pulled Crocker outside. The woman followed on bare feet.
“¿Que pasa?” Crocker asked.
“Ella quiere ver a su auto.” (“She wants to see your car.”)
“¿Mi auto? ¿Porque?”
The woman carefully inspected the dirty, bullet-scarred Explorer inside and out, studied Mancini’s biceps and tattoos, which seemed to interest her, then proposed a trade: the twenty-year-old Datsun for the new but damaged and out-of-gas Explorer.
“¿El Datsun tiene gasolina? ¿Anda bien?” Crocker asked.
“Si, claro.”
Crocker considered for a few moments, then returned to the Datsun to make sure it ran and did have a half tank of gas. It did, so he accepted.
He and the woman shook hands and exchanged keys.
Equally important was the map the old man drew on the side of a shopping bag that showed the route to the Pan-American Highway.
“Gracias, Señor,” said Crocker, squeezing the man’s callused little hand. And to the woman: “Gracias, Señorita.”
“Some lousy deal maker you turned out to be,” Mancini complained as Crocker helped him into the front seat of the Datsun.
“She wanted me to trade you for a box of mangos. I seriously considered it.”
“Very funny.”
After forty minutes of bouncing over rough, dark roads, they reach the paved highway. Then it was easy winding through the dark, verdant hills of the Mayan highlands, the half-moon lighting the thin ribbon of asphalt. The surface was so smooth and the route so back and forth that it rocked Mancini to sleep.
He snored in the passenger seat as Crocker pulled into a gas station outside Quetzaltenango to refuel and buy a prepaid Nokia 1616 for fifty dollars. Outside, standing in the cool night air with marimba music playing from a radio nearby, Crocker dialed the number he had committed to memory.
“ID yourself,” said the female duty officer who answered in Langley.
“I’m BC292. BC295 is with me.”
“Are either of you in need of immediate medical help?”
“My partner has a wounded leg, but it’s not life threatening.”
“Where are you, and how can I help you?”
“We’re on the Pan-American Highway on our way to Guatemala City, escaping from a mission in Mexico.”
“Hold on.”
Three minutes later she returned to the line. “Are you in a vehicle?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Proceed to La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City. Drive directly to the north terminal. In front of the TACA Airlines departure area, you’ll find a silver Toyota Tundra with a dark-haired woman at the wheel. Her name is Danila. Park directly behind her, identify yourself as hikers from Montreal, and get in.”
“Thank you.”
Three and a half hours later, they arrived at La Aurora International Airport and found Danila, a tall, no-nonsense Hispanic woman with a high forehead, wearing large hoop earrings. Without saying a word, she drove them past the main terminal to an Interjet hangar and stopped alongside a white BE20 Super King turboprop plane.
“There’s your ride,” she said.
“Thanks. Where’s it taking us?”
“Panama City.”
“Florida?” Mancini asked.
“No, Panama City, Panama. Enjoy.”
Fifteen hours later Crocker stood looking out a fifth-floor window at the sky turning orange, amber, and gold as the sun set over the Bay of Panama. Eighteen years earlier, before he became a SEAL, he’d served as a young navy corpsman assigned to Rodman Naval Station half a mile away from where he was standing now.
In March 1999, the six-hundred-acre base, which once housed the naval component of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), was turned over to the Panamanian government. So were a number of other U.S. military bases, including Forts Gulick, Davis, and Sherman on the Caribbean side of the isthmus, and Howard Air Force Base, Fort Amador, and Fort Kobbe on the Pacific or southern side. All of them had once formed a powerful air, land, and sea defense perimeter around the strategically important Panama Canal.
When U.S. control of the Panama Canal formally transferred to the Panamanian government on December 31, 1999, the bases were closed and most U.S. military personnel left. Rodman Naval Station was now a tank farm run by Mobil Oil. Howard Air Force Base was being developed into an international business park called Panama Pacifico.
It was strange being back in what was once called the Gorgas Army Hospital. Eighteen years ago when part of the facility housed a U.S. Navy clinic, Crocker had been operated on here for a ruptured appendix. It happened a day after he competed in a cross-isthmus marathon that originated at the Vasco Núñez de Balboa Park, which was only a couple of blocks away.
The light-green walls and the antiseptic smell were the same, reminding him of sickness and his own mortality, which he didn’t feel ready to deal with yet. He thought back to the ranch in Tapachula and the old man he had met in the Mayan hills.
Life followed a mysterious path and offered unexpected challenges, disappointments, and pleasures. They hadn’t found the Clarks’ daughter, which meant there was still more to accomplish, and more enemies to defeat.
Ambition burned white-hot at the base of his spine, goading him forward, compelling him to work harder and perform at an even higher level than he had before.
Somewhere he had once read: If you only do what you think you can, you never do much.
A young Hispanic woman in a light-blue uniform walked in and asked him in heavily accented English why he wasn’t in bed. Her short hair had been bleached blond, but the dark roots showed.
“I feel like looking out the window,” Crocker answered.
“You not ready,” she said, taking him by the forearm and leading him back to bed. She tucked the sheets around him and recorded his temperature and blood pressure on a chart that she then replaced in a plastic sleeve and tucked under her arm.
“What’s wrong with me?” Crocker asked.
“Many things.”
“Like what?”
“I call the doctor.”
“How long have I been here?”
She left without answering, the backs of her too-big yellow Crocs slapping against the blue linoleum floor.
He remembered the Super King turboprop landing in Panama City, red-and-blue flashing lights, Lisa Clark waving as she was wheeled to the back of an ambulance, and Max Jenson introducing him to the CIA station chief in Panama-a friendly dark-haired man who said he had met Crocker briefly when he was stationed in Afghanistan.
The nurse reentered, accompanied by a tall doctor with a large watermelon-shaped head. His name tag read DR. DANNY RAMOS.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Ramos asked in a Texas accent as he pressed a stethoscope to Crocker’s chest.
“Better than I did last night.”
“Breathe deeper.”
Waves of pain rose from his abdomen and ribs.
“Turn over.”
Dr. Ramos pulled up the back of the light-green hospital gown and pressed the middle of Crocker’s back. “Any pain?”
“Nothing I can’t deal with.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pain is just weakness leaving the body.”
The doctor chuckled. “That’s an interesting concept that’s not backed up by science.”
Dr. Ramos marked something on the chart and replaced it in the plastic sleeve at the end of the bed. “The skin around your eyes and eyelids is still swollen. But that will go down. I’ll have the nurse re-dress the bandages in the morning, then I’ll examine you again to see if you’re okay to go,” he said, waving his big hand at the thirty or so little white bandages on Crocker’s forehead, cheeks, neck, arms, shoulders, and chest.
“What was I admitted for?”
“Chlorine poisoning, smoke inhalation, and multiple bruises, cuts, and abrasions.”