Gerrie Nelson - Lab Notes

Diane and Olimpia shared some pizza with four Kogi tribesmen. The men baked it in a thousand-year-old stone open-flame oven that would have been coveted by any restaurant in the world. Diane found the meal and the company quite satisfying.

Two of the Kogi reported they had been sent to guide Diane and Olimpia up the secret pathways into their homelands aloft, a three-day trip. Everyone turned in early. The trek would begin at dawn.

Diane collapsed into her hammock and watched leafy shadows beyond the fire through the open doorway. Slowly, the whispers on high lulled her to sleep.

Diane was startled awake by gruff voices and quickly realized it wasn’t a dream. She sat up in her hammock and squinted toward the doorway. Dark figures passed between the hut and the fire in a confusion of motion. Beyond the fire, intermittent, strobe-like images flashed by: bearded men, ammunition belts, automatic weapons, Olimpia. What were they doing with Olimpia?

Diane had close calls before with banditos and guerillas, but always eluded capture. She glanced around in the darkness of the hut. But the hospitable Kogi had thought of everything but a back door.

Now Diane heard bawdy laughter. Then the voices moved away. Olimpia?

Diane untangled herself from the mosquito netting, jumped from the hammock and headed for the door. She saw figures fading from the yellow sphere of firelight into the jungle. She peeked around the doorway just as Olimpia approached.

“Hernando and his merry band of Guerillas,” Olimpia said. “They come frequently, searching for tourists they might kidnap for ransom. They settled for the pizza. They always do.”

“But they could have had us and the pizza,” Diane said.

“They learned their lesson about academics in the early 1990’s.” Olimpia told Diane about the simultaneous kidnapping of three archeologists from American universities and a U.S. researcher studying the Kogi for a secret government program that employed psychics. The government researcher escaped, but the academics were held captive for months.

The prisoners languished in the camp, eating all the provisions, digging holes everywhere. After six months with no payment in sight, the scientists were released. And the guerillas swore they would never again attempt doing business with the universities.

Diane said, “Did the Kogi tell you anything about the government researcher?”

“They were suspicious of him. They did not invite him to their village.”

“He could have been legitimate. Vincent had a friend who was involved in a secret program that was declassified in the middle nineties. It was called ‘Star Gate.’ They employed psychics for remote viewing. It was used successfully to gain information in the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland and for pursuing some Middle East terrorists. Police in the U.S. still use remote viewing in some cases.”

Olimpia said, “The Kogi would not become involved in such a connection with the outside world. I have a special relationship with the tribe. Because of our exchange of plant knowledge, they consider me one of their natural resources. They are very protective of me—another reason we are safe from Hernando and his men.

Besides, if the guerillas captured me, who would bring them pizza?” She grinned.

They set out in the morning: two women, two Kogi guides, one goat-footed mule. They climbed down the ubiquitous stone stairs, around walls and up pathways. They stopped briefly at the “stables,” ancient caves carved into precipitous cliff faces.

Diane saw magnificent white horses grazing in aerial pastures—fenced-in stone outcroppings. There were twenty or thirty of them. They were powerful looking creatures; compact, wide-chested, relatively short legged. And when they pranced, their necks arched in a majestic curve, and their manes and tails of angel hair flowed behind them.

Wide-eyed, Diane approached Olimpia. “Where did they come from?”

“The Kogi say they were imported from Europe. They are Lipizzaner stallions, descended from the Andalusian horses of the Spanish conquistadors. You have probably heard of them. For centuries the Lipizzaner was considered the horse of royalty in Europe.”

“Their owners, are they from Santa Marta?”

“The Kogi will not talk about them…” Olimpia looked toward the waiting Kogi guides. “We should go.”

And so their assent began. First, a stone staircase took them up and up and up to the next plateau.

Looking back, Diane saw flashes of white horseflesh through the dense foliage. What an enchanted place: A jungle where guerillas ate gourmet pizza, huts whispered lullabies and clairvoyants tended unicorns that waited for their masters in thousand-year-old caves.

But who were these masters? And how often did they come?

The guides pressed on mercilessly the first day. Climbing through three vegetation zones, they traversed ridges, descended into hidden valleys, slid behind waterfalls and ascended ancient stairways. Negotiating the rough terrain, Diane understood how the Kogi evaded any would-be conquerors over the centuries.

In early evening the group arrived at the first campsite, a wide ledge with a glimpse of the glittering sea thousands of feet below. The push had been worth it.

The Kogi rewarded their effort with flame-roasted venison and mangoes. After dinner, Diane and Olimpia sat by the fire sipping tea from wooden cups. Olimpia picked up a twig, slowly scratched a question mark in the ashes, then turned to Diane. “So… why the hasty departure?”

Diane looked down at the distant sea. After fleeing Carrera Island, she had thought of fabricating some tale of woe. But she came to realize that if Olimpia was in league with the Carreras, she already knew their side of the story. So she might as well tell her the rest. But where to start? How could she distill the nightmarish scene into meaningful language? Not the methodical inventory of facts she had laid out for the Coast Guard, but the description of her husband’s murder, as she saw it.

Then the video returned to her with wrenching clarity. And the words came to her in a torrent. She described the swift white monster diving, breaching, closer, closer, plunging toward its mark. Vincent’s fall. Splintering wood. The retreating stern with its muddled black letters spelling treachery.

“It was Aruba, not Cuba,” she cried. It was the MARIA V.”

Olimpia looked stunned. Her lips moved but nothing came out. Then, finally, she said, “With those weather conditions and at that distance, how can you be sure of what you saw on video?”

Diane bit her lip and stared straight ahead. Olimpia continued.

“Your theory that it was an intentional collision does not hold up. They would have had to track him down in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Even if they knew the point of his departure and his destination, how could it be possible to pinpoint his location?”

Diane wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and thought a moment. She remembered scores of people having access to Woodwind the month before the race. Electricians, riggers, electronics experts, mechanics all came and went freely.

Just before the race, ESPN installed the videocam. That day alone, there were at least ten people aboard the boat working on different systems. No one at BRI knew them. Anyone of them could have smuggled a transmitter on board. In addition, all the racers reported their latitude and longitude via single side band daily. That could have been intercepted.

Diane looked up at Olimpia with a steely squint. “I’m certain of what I saw. And yes, Woodwind could have been tracked electronically.”

“But why would they do it?” Olimpia asked.