“What wrong with you?” Wordlessly, they grabbed his shoulders and tied his hands behind his back. “Aye, what you doing?” he protested.
A hand slapped his face. He felt a stunning blow on his neck and his eyes dimmed. He pushed and twisted, stumbled over rocks, but they kept him pinned. They seized him around his waist and grabbed his collar. Each time he resisted, they punched his stomach, slapped his face and ears. His heart beat rapidly. Balbosa had betrayed him. He had tricked him into coming to this mainland cave. He had promised new deals with strange underworld figures, these Spaniards with warahoon guards who stood with their sharpened blades of steel pinned on their waistbands. Sabagal had been kidnapped.
Despite his outcries and struggling, they ignored him and dragged him to a wall of unhewn rock. They lashed his wrists together and tied him to the wall, hands high overhead. They removed his boots, dropped his pants, and Sabagal stood on cold ground, a figure of desolate hope. They brought him papers to sign, promissory notes, pages of information quantifying his enormous wealth in cash and real estate which they had scrawled on his notepad. They twisted his thumbs, lowered his hand, and proffered him a pen to sign, but he refused. Slaps rained on his head, and they struck his shins with a steel rod. He resisted, prayed and yelled, cursed in the darkness as the men continued to torture him. The lashes on his feet brought more pain. He screamed in agony as they bent his fingers back. Then a finger snapped. He began to breathe heavily, then he became unconscious. He hung limp and wet, eyes closed.
Suddenly terrifying growls, painful groans erupted around him and he awoke. Primordial beasts with red unblinking almond eyes surrounded him. Gray monstrous animals — bears? wolves? mountain beasts? or denizens of the cave? He cringed at the long white fangs and the slabbering tongues of blood. But where were his enemies, the mute band of terrorists who had tortured him? Confronted by this disastrous sight, body and mind once more collapsed to nothingness.
Hours later, days, or was it a week? He had lost all sense of time. He remembered people from whom he had taken money and not delivered garments and household articles. What about the old woman whose cash he had confiscated? Bundled one-hundred-dollar bills tied with vines. The couple who had saved all their cane-cutting money accumulated for years. And the papers, the land transaction deeds he had secretly convinced illiterate people to sign. The stolen jewelry, the numerous frauds and crooked deals all flashed before him. Until now he had not realized to how much his evil deeds had amounted.
He was hungry and thirsty. The men were prodding him. He opened his eyes and snapped to his senses — they were unshackling him. He crumpled before them. The proffered bowl of food and frosty drink was tempting. Mumbling, pleading, he stretched out his hand, but each time he reached for the bowl, Vasquez presented the pen. “Sign and you will get all you want to eat.”
“Quick or you go dead right here, minute by minute,” Balbosa threatened. “Snake go crawl all over you.”
Sabagal saw it then — the huge reptile unwinding itself in the bamboo cage. Python or macajuel? He trembled, then reluctantly grasped the papers and signed where he was told. Balbosa placed the pages in a black leather bag and zipped it. Sabagal was raised up. Several hands grasped his feeble body and dragged him out of the cave.
It was night. A palpable calm hovered over the still sea. Only the glittering stars gave the scene a sign of life. The black racer was tied under the jetty. But the men lowered Sabagal’s beaten body onto the floor of another power craft specially constructed and outfitted for the high seas.
Across the bay the stuttering engines came to life. Salty sprays flew over the heads of the crew as the boat sped over the water, the shoreline lost in the darkness as the ocean opened up before them. No one tended to the prisoner lying on his back, groaning at the bottom of the boat. Minutes later a light appeared in the east, a dazzling beam that grew brighter. Then they heard the unmistakable drone of a powerboat.
The vessel grew in size, a double hull with intense search beams. Twelve men stood on deck, strapped on the bow. The craft drew alongside, cautioning them to stop. Sabagal wondered if his men were involved with the crew of the other boat. On that watery stage of the ocean theater, the two boats floated against an inky sky, their crews facing each other silently. Ra tatta tatta ta! The marine stillness was shattered by rapid explosions of machine guns erupting into smoke, flames, and splattered blood, shots ringing out as bodies heaved and fell.
Sabagal remained motionless as the men dropped around him, his attackers who moments earlier were full of energy. Total massacre onboard — except for Sabagal, lying motionless on the bottom of the boat. Then, from the invading craft, a long pole loomed and lifted the black bag out of the gore, plucking the treasured documents with Sabagal’s signature scrawled by his cramped hand only moments before. The double-hulled craft awakened to new life and headed toward a horizon tinged with a hint of dawn on rose-pink clouds, leaving a trail of frothing foam gradually dissipating to nothingness.
White herons suddenly lifted off from the mangrove, its branches relieved from the weight of the birds as the cargo of the dead floated past. The spectral sight of death was disturbingly macabre even to the birds perched in clusters. Soon the sky was alive with whirring white wings and chattering herons, as if their cries protested the invasion of their roost. Below, the floating vessel grimly displayed ruptured bodies strewn across the bow, blood-soaked and exposed, as water seeped through the holes of the bullet-punctured boat.
A lone fisherman, casting his net in the bay from a rock, was curious when the noisy gulls hovered over him. Then he saw the boat, drifting listlessly. He assumed there was no one in it until he waded out and discovered the gruesome cargo. Two bodies, shattered by powerful machine-gun fire, were without limbs. A third had its chest ripped open. The others, lying lopsided across the cockpit, were unrecognizable. The horror was too much for the fisherman. He splashed ashore and, leaving his fish and cast net behind, ran to the road yelling like a madman. At the center of the road he waved his hands until he was picked up by a passing motorist. The driver was stunned, thought the fisherman was insane, could not understand why he was behaving in such a manner. But when he looked in the direction of the mangrove where the frantic man was pointing, he saw the place coming alive with a growing crowd.
At the St. Christopher Nursing Home, Sabagal lay still like a white log. Shaven, wrapped like a mummy, he hovered between life and death. Because painful wounds all over made eating or drinking impossible, plastic tubing harnessed his body — protruding from his mouth and nostrils, drips slowly entering his veins, his eyes closed. His family gazed at him and wished he would open his eyes, bring some hope to their yearning to see him live.
His wife Nicola was thankful to the inspectors for hiding her husband from public scrutiny when they escorted the bodies from the boat at the Godineau mangrove. Sabagal had not been identified in that mass of human remains because policemen had kept the crowd away from the bodies.
Still, Scobie and Habib, his home-based trusted men, feared that Sabagal’s enemies might return to kill him. Overcome with the horror of Sabagal’s suffering, they pleaded with the doctors to let them stay late nights in the ward and keep watch, their firearms concealed under their coats. Always on the alert, the two men guarded the steps, watched the elevators open and close, even scrutinized the nurses and maids in their starched white uniforms as they came with their trolleys and trays. Scobie and Habib took no chances. In the past, men had disguised themselves as women and killed patients who had survived prepared executions. The drug-and-gun game of power and death had become a dangerous calamity in districts where the youth were daring and careless. Automatic weapons and more sophisticated rapid-fire Lugers and Smith & Wesson handguns were available, smuggled in in plastic kegs strapped under the hulls of fishing boats and even in the bellies of groupers and sharks.