It had been a moonless night, and the sky was a vast, impenetrable blackness in his darkest memories. He was flying in a retrofitted Skyvan, a propeller-powered aircraft so squat in its design that it was nicknamed the Flying Shoebox. This craft was owned by the Argentine Coast Guard. Nearly all of the passenger seats had been removed to expand the plane’s cargo capacity, and El Oso was buckled into one of the few that remained. The plane’s normal flight crew was in the cockpit. El Oso was part of a working crew that included a noncommissioned officer and a petty officer. The military rotated different working crewmembers onto each flight-involving as many operatives as possible-so that no one who worked at the detention center could point fingers without implicating himself or a friend. El Oso had, of course, heard rumors about the flights, and he had begun to speculate about the nature of his assignment from the moment he received orders to report to the landing field at ESMA, one of the largest and most notorious of all the secret military detention centers. For El Oso, however, the exact purpose of this particular flight was not confirmed in his own mind until he saw about twenty naked, unconscious prisoners laid side-by-side on the floor of the aircraft.
“Falcon, are you there?” It was Swyteck’s voice on the telephone, somehow cutting through the deafening airplane engines.
“Just shut up and get Alicia on the line!”
Swyteck kept talking, more stalling, but Falcon wasn’t even listening. He was barely aware of the fact that he was still inside a motel room, let alone that he was on the telephone. There was so much noise inside his head, those damn engines roaring from the past. But why so loud?
They had left the hatch open. The Skyvan had a rear hatch that slid down to open, and there was no intermediate position. It either had to be closed or fully open. On the Wednesday-night flights, the hatch definitely remained open. El Oso was staring directly into the night, a black hole in the aft of a noisy aircraft. Between him and the gaping hatch lay the rows of naked bodies on the floor. He wished that each and every one of them were dead, but he knew better. Only the living would require the injection of a sedative from a medical doctor. The doctor. He was making his rounds, so to speak, moving from one prisoner to the next, administering a second injection that would keep them unconscious. El Oso hadn’t noticed at first, but as the doctor worked his way up the row of naked bodies, emptying his syringe, his face came clear. Finally, El Oso made the connection. This man was no stranger. This was the very same navy doctor to whom he had taken prisoner 309’s newborn baby just two months earlier.
“A couple more minutes, Falcon,” said Swyteck. “Alicia’s on her way.”
Falcon grunted a reply of some kind, but it wasn’t even in English. His memories had him thinking in Spanish, his native tongue.
Mandar para arriba. Send them up. El Oso had been waiting for the order, and it came in those exact words from the commissioned officer. It came just as soon as the doctor had administered the last of the injections and disappeared into the cockpit, literally turning his back on the prisoners-his patients. The physician’s own “disappearance” was an ironic charade, a way to serve the regime and maintain merely technical compliance with his Hippocratic oath. When the doctor was gone, El Oso’s work began. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose, and started toward the row of naked, sleeping prisoners. Among them were the young and not so young, men and women alike. Some bore the burn marks of the grill. Others were bruised from relentless beatings. A skilled torturer could implement the tactics of “special interrogation” without leaving such marks, but finesse of that sort was completely unnecessary in the case of prisoners who were being “sent up.” El Oso worked in a two-man team. They started with the prisoner nearest the hatch, a man who was perhaps in his early twenties, perhaps even younger. El Oso took his arms. His teammate took the prisoner’s ankles. They lifted him up from the floor. In the prisoner’s unconscious state, his body sagged between them and hung before the open hatchway like a broad, sadistic smile.
“Are you still there, Falcon?”
“I’ve had it with this! Stop stalling. Where’s Alicia?” It was a coherent response, and it took every ounce of psychological fortitude for Falcon to string the words together. Even so, he wasn’t strong enough to pull himself up from the past. The lucid moment, however, had managed to shift his focus slightly. It was suddenly as if El Oso were another man entirely, someone whom Falcon didn’t even want to know. This stranger called El Oso was working furiously but in sync with his teammate, swaying the bodies back and forth as if rocking a hammock. They would release on the count of tres, “sending up” the prisoners only in the most figurative sense, as the bodies would soon plunge into the cold, black ocean below, into the depths of the disappeared. The young man went first, then a woman, followed by two men who looked like brothers, an older woman, and so on. Grab the ankles, swing the body, and release. El Oso was on autopilot, discharging his duty with “subordination and courage, to serve the Fatherland,” in accordance with the detention center’s ritual salute. He’d lost count of the prisoners that had, by his own hands, passed through the hatchway. His movements became almost robotic as he disposed of one subversive after another. Their faces were without expression, their transformation into zombies having begun hours earlier, back at the detention center, with the first injection of penthonaval. They went out without a sound, without any knowledge of their fate, without any final scorn for their murderers-until it was the turn of a certain young woman, who suddenly slipped free from El Oso’s grasp and grabbed him by the wrist.
Perhaps she hadn’t been dosed properly. Or maybe it was her extraordinary will to survive that had fought off the sedative and roused her to a state of semiconsciousness. Whatever the explanation, she had found the strength to reach for El Oso and grab him tightly enough to draw him halfway into the open hatchway. At the last second, he managed to brace himself against the frame with his right foot, and his teammate snagged him by the arm. He was staring into empty space, inches away from his own death at the hands of this young woman whose face was no longer without expression. She was no longer just another subversive. She fought with the determination of the young mother she was, and before she disappeared into the darkness, El Oso was struck by a bolt of recognition: he knew that it was La Cacha prisoner 309.
“Damn it, Swyteck! Put Alicia Mendoza on the phone right now!”
“I just need another minute. I swear, she’s almost here.”
Falcon pushed his memories aside, shoved them right through that yawning black hole in the back of the Skyvan, but the young mother’s face was forever lighted in his mind.
He went to Theo and put a gun to the prisoner’s head. “You’ve got one minute, Swyteck. Your buddy’s got one more minute.”
chapter 61
I ’m here!”
Jack heard Alicia announce her arrival just a split second before the door flew open and she hurried into the mobile command unit.
“Where the heck have you been?” said Jack.
“My parents’ house.”
“Sergeant Paulo has been psycho calling you for almost fifteen minutes. Why didn’t you answer?”
“It’s complicated.”
Jack couldn’t contain his reaction. “What do you mean it’s-”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Vince, interrupting. “She’s here, and there isn’t time for this. Alicia, I need you on the phone right now.”
“Okay.” She moved closer to the desk and took the empty seat by the phone. “What should I say?”
“Just say ‘Hello, this is Alicia Mendoza.’ Then hand the phone back to me.”
Jack said, “That’s not going to satisfy him. In fact, teasing him like that might only infuriate him and make him take it out on Theo.”