“Down south, they’re still farmer-types, so you don’t want to attack too close to dawn, but they also like to stay up drinking aguadiente, so you don’t want to attack too close to midnight, either. This whole country, it’s a balancing act.”
He’d sent his men ahead in a tight convoy consisting of two Humvees and an armored personnel carrier. We’d be in radio contact, but he’d already briefed them on the plan of attack.
A helicopter? Humvees and armored cars? I looked at the hundreds of books on the office shelves, at the careful crafting of the wood, at the expensive, imported furniture, his executive’s desk, at the carvings and sculpture and the thick Persian carpet before I said, “Did you really get this rich killing people?”
I could see that the question irked him. Like many small, driven men, Tyner had small, nervous mannerisms. One was twisting the tips of his handlebar mustache. Another was an unconscious motion as if he were washing his hands over and over-a Freudian mannerism that could have meant something, or could have meant nothing.
“You sound as if you disapprove. Hah! Coming from you-of all people-that’s almost funny.”
I said, “I’m not making judgments, Sergeant. I’m just curious.”
“In that case, I’ll answer your question. Come here and take a look at this map of Colombia. See the middle section highlighted in red? It’s the size of a large state. The idiots in the government here gave all that land to FARC, the guerrillas. That’s like siege victims throwing ransom over the walls.
“FARC’s region, it’s got everything: timber, minerals, good farmland, and a potential for oil. If the bastards were smart, had some initiative, they’d have their own thriving little country going by now.”
Tyner turned to look at me, still irritated. “But they aren’t smart. And they’re lazy. Instead of working, getting rich, they keep asking for more, more. They don’t want political change, they want bribes. They want a free ride. See where I’m going with this, Commander?”
I said, “Sorry to be dense but, nope, not a clue.”
He returned his attention to the map and pointed to a section southeast of the FARC area. It was highlighted in blue, not as large, but still sizeable. “This,” he said, “is the territory I control. I’ve worked my ass off here for ten years, and every year the government gives me a little more for a very simple reason: I’m better at doing the things they don’t have the stomach or the brains to do. I make them look good. And I make it safer. That’s the main reason they don’t hassle me, and why I’m making lots of money.”
I said, “They pay you a bounty for the guerrillas you kill. I know that. But it can’t be that much. Not enough to run the operation you have here.”
He was smiling, proud of himself, once again twisting the ends of his mustache as he answered, “See? You’re a smart man. Bounty-hunting, that’s small time. Quick cash, but no future. I realized that from the start. So I’m going to tell you the truth. I haven’t shared this with many others. What I’ve done is start several ancillary companies. As a group, I’ve incorporated nationally and international. A little thing called Backyard Enterprises. Can you figure out why?”
I risked angering him further by saying, “No. Back Door Enterprises, that’d make sense. But not Backyard. Where’s the name come from?”
“Think about it. How often do you hear people say it in the States? People need oil, but they won’t let the oil companies drill. They get hysterical-not in our backyard, they can’t. People create waste, all kinds of waste: petroleum and plastic and-” He nodded as if he could see me catching on. “And they create nuclear waste, too. A major nuclear plant creates only about a dump truck full of spent rods a year. Hell, the French, of all people, have proven how damn safe it is-but same thing. People go ape-shit. Safe or not, no matter how much it’s regulated, no one’s going to let it be dumped. Not in their backyard.”
Sergeant Tyner gestured grandly toward the bulletproof glass and the jungle vista beyond. “So welcome to my backyard. No regulations, no rules, no controls. The world needs lumber? I’ve got it. A dumping ground? I’ve got that, too.” His voice lowered slightly, as if he were about to share a valuable secret with me. “Have you ever noticed, Commander, that the more sophisticated a society becomes, the more adolescent it behaves? Back in the States, they want all of the benefits but refuse the responsibilities. Let’s face it, most people are sheep. And they’re cowards, too.”
Now the little man reached out and tapped his index finger on my chest, an intentional invasion. “You know why they’re cowards? Because they know the truth, but they won’t allow themselves to admit it. You know the truth. I know the truth. What we’ve done, our lives, our actions prove it. But the common person-they can’t handle it. It terrifies them.”
I looked at his finger until he took his hand away, and then I said, “The truth about what?”
Blue eyes glittering, Tyner used his head to indicate the doorway. “Follow me. You’ll understand. I’ll show you. You’re one of the few.”
Down two flights of stairs, dug deep into the hillside, walled with thick cement and barred by double sets of locked, fireproof doors, was Sgt. Curtis Tyner’s armory-the Vault.
I followed him out of some perverse desire to prove he was wrong but felt a strange sense of unreality. He kept saying over and over that he and I had much in common, that we were alike in many ways. Even to myself, I could not prove how wrong he was until I had seen it all, whatever it was. It was the only way to prove that I was right, at least, in my hope that we could not have been more different.
But if I were so certain, why did I feel such overwhelming dread?
He used three different keys to unlock the metal doors, and when the doors swung open, he reached into the darkness, touched a switch, and an apartment-sized room was illuminated with sterile neon. I’d expected some fashion of survivalist bunker-a safe place to sit out WW III-but, instead, I stepped into a precisely maintained little arsenal. The walls were lined with professional-quality gun lockers; the stainless-steel bench tables were as neatly kept as those in my own lab.
Tyner began opening lockers, handing me equipment: an Autovon voice-activated radio, with headset (“Tonight, we’ll have to be in close radio contact”), Generation 5 night-vision goggles (“My team owns the night-it’s our biggest advantage”), and several choices of body armor, or bulletproof vests.
I accepted it all without comment, certain that he was creating a little mote of time, a period of linear decompression, before showing to me whatever it was he wanted me to see.
Perhaps it was to get a more pure reaction. There may have been something in my face he expected to read. Whatever the reason, I was right.
When I had all the gear piled in my arms, I said, “Well, I better get back and check on how Keesha’s doing. And get some sleep.”
He held up two index fingers-twin exclamation points-and replied, “Not yet. There’s one more thing you need to see. My collection. Did you forget? It’s why we’re here.”
On the far wall was the biggest of all the brown metal gun lockers, and he used another set of keys to open the double doors. Inside, on shelf after shelf, row after row, were what looked to be small glass aquariums but were probably terrariums because I didn’t smell the familiar ozone odor that I knew so well.
Instead, the open lockers filled the room with an unusual leathery, musty smell, a slightly acrid air.
When Tyner touched another light switch, I saw why.
Inside the locker, inside the glass housings, were rows of tiny, shrunken, human heads. Dozens. A hundred. Probably more. All males, and every race represented. Each head was isolated, individualized, by its own thin, glass boundary. Eyes and lips sewn shut, the miniature faces were frozen in various expressions of horror or pain, but all shared a dumb look of final, abject submission.