Quest for redemption, p.24
Quest for Redemption, page 24
“I’m okay,” he said. He was a little foggy from exhaustion, but…well, more than a little foggy. He knew from experience that the best thing to do in that situation was keep his mouth shut, but something had been bothering him all during the hike to Colpa. He asked, “Are we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are we okay? Are we going to make it? You and me, when we get back home. What’s our future looking like, Gina? Things will eventually get back to normal, but it’ll be a ‘new normal’ for us. What’s that gonna look like?”
There was no response from her for a very long moment, then a sigh. Jim looked at her, but the shadows hid her face. He could see enough to know she was looking away from him, one of her tells. Either she was upset with him or was troubled about something and subconsciously wanted to keep him from reading her expression, even in the dark. Then, another sigh. “Jim, can we wait to talk about this when we’re safe? I don’t—”
“I appreciated what you said back at Wayra,” he said, knowing he was interrupting her, something she hated, but not caring. His emotions, kept in check for all but a few moments during this damnably long day, were burbling up. A part of his weary brain told him it was because he was so very tired; he needed to rest, to shut up and put in his time on post and then hit the rack, because tomorrow would be another long day, but he kept going. “I know what we said to each other when I got to the lodge. I was so happy to see you…I didn’t know if you were dead or alive.”
“And I was happy to see you, too,” she said. “It’s been a terribly long day, Jim. We’re both so very tired, we shouldn’t trust ourselves to think clearly about…certain things.”
“About our marriage, you mean?”
Another sigh. “Yes, about that. I know this trip has been…unusual for us, for everyone. We shouldn’t think that just because we are together right now, that we—”
He put a hand on her arm, and not too gently. “We’re going to make it!” he said. “And I mean, after we get out of here. We’re going to make it, aren’t we? When we get back home?”
She shook her head. “Jim, I’m exhausted. Can we talk about something else? We need to stay awake, and alert.”
He took his hand away, knowing he should shut up, accept that Gina was with him now, would be with him tomorrow and when they made it to Cusco to start the long trip home. But there was something deep inside him that had started coming out on the way up to the Pass, just that morning. He had to let it out so he could deal with it, so she could help him. He took a deep breath. “You know, it was just last night we were making love back at the first lodge. It seems like a year ago, but it was just twenty-four hours. It was great, and then I was touching you, as you stood next to the bed…you felt something then, didn’t you? I saw it, in the way you reacted.”
“Jim, please…”
“I have to know…were you thinking of him?” As soon as he said the words, he regretted it, but it had been in the back of his mind all day, in spite of everything. He had to know.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Jim!”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
She stood up, quivering with anger. “You want the truth? Yes, I thought of him, just for a moment. Yes, a part of me wanted to fottere him that night we went out, wanted him very badly. But you know something? That’s all it ever was, just thinking about him, in bed. I let him kiss me, yes. And he touched me. We touched each other. And if I would’ve invited him inside, he would’ve gladly followed me to the bedroom. Our bedroom, and he would’ve had me right there!”
“Okay, I get it.”
“No, you don’t! Because I said no to the sex. While I was saying goodnight to him in our driveway, you were screwing that girl up in Hayward! We each had a choice to make that night, Jim. I chose to be faithful to you. Yes, I waited till the last minute, but in the end, I chose our marriage. Would he have been good in bed? Would I have enjoyed myself? Stupid questions. You know the answers. You found out for yourself, how it would be, didn’t you?” He felt her eyes boring into him. “I made my choice, Jim, and you made yours. You let her put a mickey in your drink like some idiot at a bar, like a college boy who doesn’t know any better. All that…that disciplina ferrea, that ‘iron discipline’ you pride yourself on, what happened to it that night? Some pretty young girl half your wife’s age shows you her fica and that’s all it takes, eh?”
He jumped to his feet, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “Yeah? Well, you said that you touched your boy-toy Doctor Boz right on his main operating instrument. So what if you didn’t unzip him, a few millimeters of fabric makes it all okay?” Tears were streaming down his face. He turned her so that he could see hers in the dim glow from the lodge, and she was crying, too.
“What are we doing to each other, Jim?” she said, barely able to get the words out. “Why do we torment each other with these awful memories? We are just keeping them alive, letting them eat away at what we have built together…” She tried to collect herself. “We need to acknowledge what we did, own it. Not blame each other, because none of that will change what happened.”
Suddenly, he was so exhausted he felt he might pass out. He sat down on the ground, and after a moment she joined him. He hung his head, and the sobs came. So did the truth. “I failed,” he whispered. “I failed myself, and worst of all, I failed you. The most important person in my life, the woman I love, the woman who rescued me from loneliness and grief, the woman who drove all the way down from the top of Wisconsin to see me at the very moment I needed her the most…and I failed her. I failed you. And I can’t go back and make it right, I can’t go back to that night at the hotel, I’d give everything I have to change it, but I can’t.”
They sat facing each other, emotionally spent. Without thinking, he reached for her, as he had so many times in the past four years, and her hand was there, as it always had been.
“Jim…”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not asking you to change it. As much as I wish I wouldn’t have gone out with Clint that night, I can’t change that, either. We can’t beat ourselves up about what happened in Hayward, what happened at Lake George. We both made…questionable choices, and they cannot be changed.” She paused, breathing heavily, then reached up with her free hand to brush away tears.
She seemed to gather her strength. “Do you love me?”
“Of course, I do,” he said, the words catching in his throat. “More than ever. Gina, if we don’t make it out of here…if I don’t make it…please, never forget that I regret with all my soul what happened, that I love you so damn much, I’ll do anything…just please don’t leave me.” The silence descended suddenly, scaring him even more. “If you’re going to leave me when we get home,” he said, “just tell me now. Then tomorrow I’ll stay behind, keep those guys off your tail, and you take the group to the river and the train station. Just…just never forget that I love you.” He choked up. “Because…because that’s all I can ask of you.”
“I love you too, Jim.” She touched his cheek again, delicately, with her fingertips, the same fingertips that had touched his body so many times. Then, she moved closer, took his face in her hands, brought her forehead close to his. “Our love will get us through this. We will make it home. But first, there is one thing we must do.”
“What’s that?”
“We must take what happened at the lake, and in Hayward, and we must bury them, Jim. Bury them deep, and then we must not disturb the grave!” He felt the remarkable strength in her, passing through her to him. He grasped her shoulders, holding on for dear life, feeling his entire life spinning around but slowing, slowing from the wild maelstrom of emotions he’d fought with for the past month. “Can we do that, Jim? Bury them, and leave them behind?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“We must forgive each other. Remember what we said in our wedding vows?”
“Yes. I think so....First Corinthians, right? Fourteenth chapter? “
A small laugh. “Thirteenth. Let’s say them again.” She paused, then began. “’Love is patient, love is kind.’”
“I don’t know if I can…”
She gripped him harder. “You can, Jim. We say them on our anniversary. Open your heart! The words are there. Ask God to help you.”
He prayed for help, a plea from the depths of his tormented soul. There was a brief moment of doubt, of fear…and then he felt something inside him, a strength, a power, filling him, wiping away his fatigue. Suddenly, his mind was crystal clear. “’It does not…does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.’”
“Yes, Dolcezza! ‘It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered…”
“’…it keeps no record of wrongs.’” He laughed, feeling the words move within him, bringing him a joy he thought he’d never have again. “’Love does not delight in evil but…rejoices with the truth.’”
She laughed as well. “’It always protects, always trusts…’”
“’…always hopes, always perseveres.’”
She held his face tightly, looking him in the eyes, and despite the darkness, he could see her, see into her, feel the power they shared, again. “’Love never FAILS!’”
Their breath was short, but in tandem, as they were meant to be. “I forgive you, Jim,” she said.
“And I forgive you, Gina.” She kissed him fiercely, and he took her in his arms, never wanting to let her go again.
CHAPTER FORTY
Near Wayra Lodge
“It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action.”
Garcia had thought of that quote from Fidel more than once during the cold, tense night on the mountain. Castro said he had begun his revolution with eighty-two men, and if he had to do it again, he’d do it with ten or fifteen men and absolute faith in their cause. Well, Garcia now had less than that number following him, and “absolute faith” in the cause was as tenuous as the mist enveloping the mountaintops.
The newly combined squad began its life when Green Team joined the remnants of Red in the aftermath of the avalanche. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, the cohesiveness Garcia had seen at the beginning was in danger of coming apart.
Dawn was breaking behind the eastern peaks, and Garcia saw that he was the first to awaken to the new day. He walked a few paces from their makeshift camp and relieved himself, allowing for at least a few seconds of pleasure at the start of a day that might very well contain little more than those. Behind him, he heard the stirrings of others. Finishing his business, he zipped his pants and turned to look at what was left of his command.
It was perhaps the most motley field camp ever slapped together. They had stripped the lodge of everything they could carry and might need overnight: blankets, pillows, padding from some of the beds. A few tarpaulins. Fortunately, food and water supplies were plentiful. Against his better judgment, he’d allowed the men to build cooking fires to roast some of the meat they’d taken from the lodge’s larder. If the troops behind them had those infernal thermal optic devices used by the Americans, a cook fire would stand out like a sore thumb, so he had the men shield the fires as much as possible. Even so, they were cold and miserable, and morale was not good. Exhausted himself, Garcia could do little to raise their spirits.
They were a kilometer down the trail from the lodge, and a good three hundred meters up on one of the mountainsides, with plenty of cover and a vantage point good enough to allow his sentries to see the troops trudging into the lodge near midnight. No doubt the helicopter had landed near the tent, and the four bodies lying there should have alerted the soldiers that something was indeed amiss here on the placid Salkantay. Yet, their unit discipline, Gutierrez said, was sloppy as they approached the lodge. There was still plenty of food there, so the troops had fired up the generator and made themselves as comfortable as possible before turning out the lights near one in the morning.
Whoever they were, they were not elite troops, certainly not Esperitus Negros special forces, the most feared unit in the Peruvian military. So, Garcia concluded, he still had a chance to make something of this mission and escape, even if it meant Bolivia. If he could just keep his unit from splintering…
Castro had held his eighty-two men together for years in the highlands of Cuba, fighting an entrenched enemy that had every logistical advantage and the backing of the United States. Yes, the Russians had supplied Castro with some weapons, but the success of his revolution had come not from the strength of arms from Moscow, but the power of his people’s convictions, and especially from the leadership of Fidel himself. Garcia had never met El Comandante, who was now nearing, what, eighty-nine years of age? Ninety? Undoubtedly infirm and in seclusion, Castro had long ago turned the reins of power over to his younger brother, Raúl.
Garcia had visited Havana once, where he was wined and dined by some of the Revolution’s big shots as befit the rising star of Peru’s own struggle against the capitalists, but in truth he had not been overly impressed with the city. The crumbling buildings, the ancient American cars chugging along the boulevards, the hordes of prostitutes tempting the European and Canadian tourists…what Fidel had built was certainly not what Garcia wanted to see in Lima, or in any other part of Peru. There had to be a better way. Castro had listened to the Russians, but Garcia and his leaders were learning from the Chinese, whose revolution, by all accounts, was providing their people with order and security and a good standard of living, and at the same time building a military machine that was nearly ready to challenge the mighty Americans in Asia and the western Pacific. As inscrutable and frustrating as the Chinese could be, at least what they offered made sense for Peru.
But revolutionary rhetoric, whether it came from Mao’s Little Red Book or the writings of Karl Marx, was not what would sustain his men on this day. They would need real leadership, pragmatic, but at the same time bold and effective. He knew that their greatest wish right now was to get home, with or without the American hikers in tow. Could he inspire them to complete the mission, even with everything that had happened?
The government troops were now only a kilometer or so away, and the hikers a few more in the other direction. There was only one direction in which the men could go, and it was time to get them moving that way. Garcia adjusted his beret and strode into the camp with authority. The first man he saw was Aguilar, rolling off the rubber mat he’d taken from the lodge. The big sergeant stood up, yawned, scratched his balls and then saw his Teniente. “Good morning, El Tigre! Did you sleep well?”
“Like a baby,” Garcia said. “I woke up every three hours with full drawers!”
Aguilar threw his head back and started to laugh, but then caught himself, forcing the laughter back. He gave Garcia a wide grin instead. “We will get the Americans today, won’t we?”
Garcia clapped the big man on the shoulder. Aguilar was with him, and that meant the rest would fall in line. “Yes, we will,” he said. “Rouse the men. We move out in twenty minutes.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Colpa Lodge – Third day on the trail
An hour before dawn, Gina allowed herself to slowly come to full wakefulness. Despite her exhaustion, or perhaps because of it, she’d slept fitfully. Next to her, Jim mumbled and panted, caught in his dreams again. More than once they’d awakened her, and she’d touched him gently, rubbing his shoulder or his back, calming him down so that he could resume the sleep she knew he desperately needed.
They all needed sleep, but they needed it in quiet, safe hotel rooms. Better yet, their own bedrooms back home in America, where things like gunfights with terrorists didn’t happen, where police responded within a few minutes of a cell phone call, where revolutions were things that happened in other countries.
Like the one they were in now, she reminded herself.
She had not for a moment considered the motives behind the men who were chasing them—and she was sure they were still out there, ready to close in. What did it matter? They were not after the Americans to sit down with them over chai tea and discuss their grievances against the Peruvian government, and against the United States, which surely supported Lima in the struggle against Shining Path, or what was left of it. This was a dispute to be decided by the people of Peru, and by everything she’d heard, the people had decided the matter some time ago. These men with the guns hadn’t gotten the memo. Their war was over, and they’d lost.
Gina knew she was looking at it strictly from an American perspective. She was fiercely proud of her Italian heritage, but she’d gladly worked to get U.S. citizenship, as so many of her countrymen had done for some two hundred years. Her own maternal grandfather, on the day of her wedding to Larry, had told her during their dance that he hoped she would become an American one day. “The American GIs, they saved my life when I was a young man,” he said to her, tears in his eyes. A few days later, she asked him to tell her the story. Giuseppe Fontana had been born in Naples, was serving a hitch in Mussolini’s army on Sardinia when he was wounded in an Allied bombing raid. Sent back home to recover, he was there when the Americans pushed out the Germans in October 1943. Six months later, the GIs saved his life, and his family’s. “Vesuvio erupted,” he told her. “I was twenty-one years old. My wife, your grandmother, was pregnant with your mother. The American soldiers evacuated the city. They saved our lives. The Germans, they would have left us to die. But not the Americans. If not for them, you would not be here today, nipotina.”
Her nonno had been very pleased with the strapping young American pilot she married, and Gina knew he would have loved Jim, too. Giuseppe died a year before she met Jim, but she knew they would’ve gotten along famously. She had worshiped the old man, and had so many wonderful memories of him and her grandmother. They brought her comfort, and she needed at least a few moments of comfort before another day of danger began.
