Coincidence Page 10

  That was odd. Where was Stefano, anyway? Why hadn’t he come over as soon as the shots had ended? Juan bolted across the road to the ditch.

  One look at his brother and Juan knew something was wrong—very wrong.

  Stefano had been kneeling, his rifle aimed and ready, when he felt the searing pain tear through his left thigh. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his back in the ditch, using every ounce of will he possessed not to scream. Now, he looked down at his leg and was surprised to find it not only still attached, but bleeding very little.

  “Jesus y Maria,” Juan said, squatting down beside him. He fingered the small hole in Stefano’s pants where the bullet had entered, then edged the pants leg up. There was no exit wound; the bullet must still be lodged in his leg.

  Polo, Severo, and now Esteban had come running across the road and were standing over him. It must, they decided, have ricocheted off one of the trucks. There was nowhere else the bullet could have come from.

  Shit, Severo thought. Hadn’t he known all along that you couldn’t anticipate everything, that something like this was bound to happen? And now that something had happened, and to the chief planner himself, what would be next? Shit.

  Juan and Esteban helped Stefano hobble across the road and poured him into the van. He was pale and clammy but assured the others he would be okay to drive. Thank God the van was automatic. Leaving the door half open, his left leg dangling out so he wouldn’t have to bend it, driving with his right, Stefano headed for the beach.

  They had to rush now. They were losing precious time. The first thing was to take care of the bodies.

  There was a staggering quantity of blood, far more than Juan had expected. Severo must have panicked and gone wild with the shooting, he fumed. Damn the man! He picked the tall guard up by his arms as Polo grasped the feet and they moved toward the pickup. Severo and Esteban approached the next body. It was lying face down in a pool of blood. When they picked it up, the dead man’s insides spilled out onto the road. Severo dropped the man’s legs and vomited.

  More time lost, Juan thought as he, Esteban, and Polo struggled with the rest of the bodies. Severo’s strong back was canceled out by his weak stomach. Juan was never going to work with the bastard again. Ah, what the hell was he saying? He’d never have to work again, period. None of them would. They’d all be retired and living a life of ease in just a few more weeks.

  By the time they had loaded the last guard into the pickup, Severo had pulled himself together to drive it around to the waiting pit behind the barn. Esteban followed in the other pickup, snd Polo in the SUV; they parked both vehicles inside the barn. Then they collected an assortment of buckets and rags from the house on their way back to the road.

  Juan retrieved a broom and a shovel from the back of the Jimmy and began sweeping spent shell casings and glass shards from the SUV’s broken headlight into the ditch, covering the lot with dirt and leaves. That left three puddles of blood—one of them nearly two feet across—on the right side of the road close to the driveway to contend with. Polo appeared with the pail of water and began sluicing the blood. He finished the two smaller spots, then started back to the house to refill the bucket as Juan spread the wet patches with sand and dirt from the shoulder.

  Juan suddenly picked up the low whine of a motor approaching from the north. Waving furiously at Polo to get out of sight, he raced for the Jimmy. He moved it forward, its right-turn signal blinking, inch by inch, gauging time and distance so that he was just beginning to turn into the driveway—and just obscuring the large puddle of blood—as a rattletrap old Ford lumbered past.

  Whatever you might say about Juan, Polo thought, you had to admit the hombre could keep his cool under pressure.

  They finished cleaning up the road, then went to help fill in the hole behind the barn. Juan was pushing them all hard now, trying to make up for lost time. It looked good in spite of their haste, he told himself, as they heaped the last shovelful of dirt and leaves on the grave. Hard to imagine that such a short time ago it had been the scene of brutal carnage. The earth was mounded and raw in the spots where it had been disturbed, but the first rain would take care of that. And within a few weeks, the rampant tropical vegetation would cover any remaining traces of the mayhem. No one would ever suspect.

  They stowed the bloodied pickup in the barn and then squeezed into the Jimmy for the short drive to the beach.

  Even without Stefano’s help Phillip had managed to unload the cocaine from the van and pile it on the beach close to the tender by the time they arrived. Severo and Polo worked with Phillip to load the cocaine into the tender and onto the Coincidence while Esteban and Juan drove the Jimmy and the van to the barn. As they neared the barn, the van’s two-way radio crackled to life. Above the static, Juan could make out that someone was inquiring about the progress of the cocaine shipment. Better to keep silent than try to fake a guard’s voice, he decided.

  When both vehicles were inside, they locked the barn door for the last time, then climbed on the waiting scooter and sped back to the cove.

  Phillip and Severo were loading the last few bales of cocaine onto the boat. Stefano was lying on the sand, his eyes closed, his face ashen. Juan decided to keep quiet about the radio call, even though he knew the lack of a response would have the cartel out scouring the road for the missing trucks in no time. But there was no use worrying Stefano with this detail. There was nothing he could do if he knew. They just had to get the beach cleared of any evidence pronto, then get their butts onboard the boat and out of range before anyone even thought of looking at this out-of-theway cove.

  Juan set to work erasing tire tracks in the sand and gathering up bits of debris to drop into the ocean once they were beyond the cove. When the tender returned for its last trip, Severo hauled the scooter onboard so it too could be dumped. Then, as carefully as they could, Juan and Severo lifted Stefano to his feet and half-carried, half-dragged him to the tender, where Phillip was waiting to pull him over the side.

  In spite of the setbacks, the whole operation, from the first sighting of the convoy to boarding the Coincidence, had taken just over an hour. Planning, Juan thought as he popped open two beers, one for himself and one for Stefano. It’s all in the planning, he reminded himself as the cove receded from view. True, it had taken an hour rather than the forty-five minutes he had told the others they were aiming for. But he had planned it that way.

  15

  The Inspiration sailed through the Isabela Channel in the Galápagos, flanked by volcanic islands of fantastic variety and beauty. The ship made her way to Puerto Ayora on Isla Santa Cruz, where it would drop anchor for a three-day stay.

  The students had already gotten a taste of the place from reading some of the literature associated with the islands. In addition to excerpts from Darwin’s works, they had read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was based on the adventures of one Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman who had spent four years on one of the islands awaiting rescue. They had read Herman Melville’s description of the islands in his story “Las Encantadas.” And they had just begun Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, a futuristic novel dealing with human evolution set in the archipelago.

  For their teachers, the islands were a sheer delight, offering a rare combination of history, oceanography, geology, conservation management, and the evolutionary study of unique species. They loved being on these fascinating islands and showing their students firsthand what most people would never know except from books.

  Dave Cameron began his lessons on the social history of the islands before the ship even docked. He told the students the islands were located directly on the equator about six hundred miles west of the South American coast. They were discovered by accident in 1535, when a Spanish vessel known as the Bishop of Panama, sailing to Peru, was becalmed in the equatorial doldrums. It was carried due west by the currents and eventually came upon the Galápagos. Because it was dry season when the ship reached land, the sailors thought the islands wer
e worthless. They saw virtually no vegetation beyond the thistles on the volcanic rock.

  Originally called Insulae de los de Galopegos, the islands were renamed Archipiélago del Ecuador after their annexation by that country. The name was changed again in 1892 to Archipiélago de Colón, in honor of Christopher Columbus.

  A few decades later, the Galápagos became a base of operations for many English pirates and buccaneers who attacked Spanish galleons returning to Spain from the New World. The Galápagos lay not far from the route between the conquered Inca Empire of the Andes and Panama and New Spain, the center of Spanish activity in the New World. Among the pirates, the islands were known as Las Islas Encantadas, the Enchanted Isles.

  Over the years the islands were used as a base for whaling fleets, as a prison colony, and as a salt mine, but many attempts to establish permanent settlements failed. Every new human encounter brought more destruction to the fragile ecosystem of the islands. This was the really interesting part, in Dave’s view, the part he most wanted to impress upon his students.

  He stopped his narrative as the ship pulled into Academy Bay, mesmerized by the sight before him. He had read so much about the history and ecology of this place, seen so many photographs, that it seemed completely familiar to him. But nothing had prepared him for the reality of it. There was Punta Estrada, its cliff face covered in guano and graffiti, sheltering the harbor. There were the mangroves, looking just as otherworldly as in the pictures, their prop roots coming down from their branches toward the water as if they were growing their own stilts for support—as, in fact, they were.

  And there, most amazing of all, were the famed blue-footed boobies, the most improbable of birds. Surely such creatures could exist only in a cartoon. The thought popped into Dave’s mind that they looked like caricatures of bewigged judges in a British court of law, wearing, with dignified eccentricity, their judicial robes, and, for some inexplicable reason, bright blue Wellington boots. The image made him laugh out loud.

  The Floaties, who had been staring at the scene, began to laugh, too, and jabber about the sights before them. Pierre shouted and pointed to a booby plummeting straight off the cliff into the water. It was soon joined by dozens—maybe hundreds—more, in a great cacophony of honks and whistles, all furling their wings behind and then dropping headfirst with such force into the bay that it was hard to believe they could survive the experience.

  Tom Michaels, who had witnessed this behavior before but never failed to be dazzled by it, explained that the birds had spotted a school of fish in the waters below and were “plunge diving” in a feeding frenzy.

  “Special air sacs protect their skulls from the impact,” he said. “The blue-footed boobies are only one of the many remarkable creatures to be found in the Galápagos. When Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835, he found that fully half the birds and plants were different from the species known anywhere else on earth. About a third of the shore fish and nearly all of the reptiles also differed. These variations helped him establish his theory of evolution.

  “Contrary to popular belief, however, Darwin did not leave the islands with a sudden dawn of enlightenment. He still believed in the creation of life along the lines of the Bible. The seeds of inquiry had been sown, however, and they matured in his mind over the years.”

  Melissa loved to see her teachers’ excitement—in fact they were practically falling over one another in their eagerness to explain what was going on and to establish relationships between the different subjects. Back home she went from one class to the next never even thinking that they might fit together into one integrated whole.

  It was a combination of human and environmental factors, Dave said, that had contributed to the deterioration of plant and animal life here. Humans, starting with the earliest explorers, had killed many of the native tortoises for food; some varieties had nearly become extinct. In addition, they had released, either accidentally or on purpose, the goats, pigs, burros, and cattle that were responsible for defoliating the islands, and had introduced rats, cats, and dogs, which ate the eggs or young of native birds and reptiles.

  “Weather is the other major factor, but now we’re getting out of my field,” Dave said. “I’d better let Tom cover that.”

  Tom leapt right in.

  “Every few years, El Niño causes the equatorial and atmospheric circulation patterns to reverse, bringing warm water and air from the western Pacific. Along with the warmth comes rain—a lot of rain. The rains moisten the dry lowlands, allowing vegetation to flourish. With food abundant, the terrestrial animals, such as iguanas and finches, do well. But at the same time, these changes inhibit the upwelling that enriches the Galápagos waters with nutrients. While terrestrial life flourishes, it is a catastrophe for marine life. Seabirds of all types are unable to raise their young and mortality is high among marine iguanas and fur seals there.”

  They had only just arrived, yet Melissa and Pierre were already beginning to grieve for the destruction of this extraordinary place.

  The next morning, students and teachers went ashore to visit the Charles Darwin Research Station, just a one-mile walk from Puerto Ayora. Several Ecuadorian university students, there to receive hands-on training in science, education, and conservation, served as tour guides. After viewing a video that described the islands and explained the mission of the station, the Floaties were led down a winding path to see one of the tortoise corrals.

  It took quite a while for the group to reach the corral. One Floatie after another halted suddenly in the middle of the gravel to marvel and to snap pictures.

  “Look!” Kathy called out. “Lava lizards!”

  “It looks like that one’s doing push-ups!” Trudy said.

  And so it was, Luisa, their guide, told them.

  “It’s a form of communication many lizards use, actually, to mark their territory and in mating rituals,” she said. “What’s really interesting about the Galápagos lava lizards is that the pattern of raising and lowering their bodies varies from island to island. You could think of it sort of like a whole-body regional accent.”

  “Are those cactus plants?” Chris asked. “They’re gigantic!”

  Luisa explained that several plants that had colonized on the islands had developed treelike forms.

  “There are even ferns and sunflowers that grow as trees here,” she said.

  The group now reached the pen that held the giant domed-shell tortoises.

  “They like visitors,” Luisa said. “Some of them even like to have their necks scratched.”

  The Floaties began clucking, whistling, murmuring “Here, Boy,” and making whatever other noises they imagined might entice a tortoise. Pierre simply stood still with his arm held out. It wasn’t long before one of the huge reptiles lumbered over to him and stretched its neck as far as possible up and out of its shell in sure anticipation of a nice long scratch. Pierre obliged as Melissa took snapshot after snapshot.

  “I keep expecting him to purr!” she said.

  “How do you know it’s a ‘him’?” Pierre asked.

  Melissa answered that they all looked like old men to her, so that’s what she would call them, never mind the facts.

  They traded places. By now several tortoises were enjoying neck massages. It was hard for the Floaties to leave their newfound friends, but they had much more to explore. Nancy took a final shot of Pierre and Melissa together stroking the “old man,” then off they went to the Breeding and Rearing Center to see newly hatched tortoises and land iguanas. The station collects eggs from several different islands, hatches them in incubators, and nurtures them for five years before repatriating them to their home islands.

  The next day the students were given free time to go ashore and pursue their own activities, with the usual caveat that they remain in groups of at least four. Pierre and Melissa were torn between taking a bus up into the highlands and going on a boat tour. Most of the Floaties, including Nancy and Michael, decided on the highlan
d tour.

  This, they were told, would give them a sense of the whole gamut of vegetation found on all of the islands as the bus slowly wound its way through a cross-section of different climatic zones, from the arid coastal region through the agriculturalized middle elevations, with their coffee and banana plantations, to the lush green dampness of the scalesia zone higher up, and then the shrubby miconia zone at the top. The garúa, the mist that cloaks the higher elevations from June through December, supports the growth of epiphytic plants—including, Michael was elated to see, mistletoe, which clung to the branches of many of the trees. What could he possibly do, he asked himself, but kiss the girl sitting beside him every time the bus passed another clump?

  As for Nancy, she was quickly losing sight of her boyfriend back in Boston.

  As interesting as the bus trip sounded, Pierre and Melissa, after much hemming and hawing, had opted for the boat. Two Israeli soldiers they had met in Puerto Ayora, Asher and Ari, had organized the tour, and had invited them and a few other Floaties to join in and share the cost, making it a relative bargain. But what clinched the deal, at least for Melissa, was the prospect of playing with sea lions.

  The small boat made its way from Academy Bay to the eastern side of Santa Cruz toward the Plaza Islands where large colonies of sea lions congregate on the rocks. Their guide spoke very good English. He had moved from Ecuador four years earlier because of his love of the sea. He stopped the boat in a little cove that was teeming with sea lions. The whole inlet echoed with their barking and squealing.

  “Ah, buenos días, my flippered friends,” the guide shouted to them. “I have brought you a boatload of new playmates!”

  The soldiers were the first to slip over the side of the boat into the water. As they swam, a small group of young sea lions wriggled off the rocks to see what was going on and then to play. The creatures had no fear of humans; they liked to be touched and allowed the soldiers to grab hold of their fins.