Stephen Leather - Breakout

‘Should get a good price for this,’ Scouse said, ‘one careful lady owner and all.’

Harper grinned. ‘That’s more like it. I was worried the old piss-taking Scouse had gone for good.’

‘Nah, not dead, just sleeping.’

As they drove on, they passed a series of crosses erected at the side of the road, some still with sun-faded bouquets of plastic flowers at their feet.

The road - though it was now so narrow and uneven that it barely deserved even to be called a track - became even worse and the large rocks protruding from the road surface and the cliff face added to its perils. In places the outer edge of the road had crumbled away altogether, as if some giant creature had been taking bites out of it. The Merc could only squeeze through those parts with its offside wheels within centimetres of a sheer drop that in places went on uninterrupted for almost a thousand metres. ‘Bloody hell,’ Scouse said, sweat pricking his brow as he tried not to look out of the window at the drop below them. ‘If we fall down that, by the time we hit the bottom, there won’t be enough of us left to make a meal for a budgie, never mind a condor.’

The stunted, wind-contorted trees and dry grasses clinging to crevices in the granite rock gave way to a cloud forest zone as they descended. As if to signal the change, the skies darkened and a brief but torrential downpour sent water cascading down the mountain side and made the surface of the road even more slippery and treacherous. The rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun but it was replaced by a thick, clinging mist. A constant stream of drips fell from ferns growing out of the rock face, and crooked trees loomed out of the mist, their branches festooned with mosses, lichens, ferns and orchids.

As the road dropped lower, it passed out of the mists of the cloud forest zone and as the air began to clear, Harper could see that the lower slopes of the mountains below them were cloaked in the dense sub-tropical vegetation that marked the start of the rainforest. There were vines, creepers and vividly coloured flowers and giant, sapphire blue Morpho butterflies weaving among them. After the bone-chilling cold of the Altiplano and the mountain peaks, for a while the air began to feel fresher and warmer, but before long that was giving way to the moist, slightly foetid atmosphere of the jungle.

They swung round yet another bend and found themselves looking down into a steep-sided valley with a fast-rushing river glinting in the sunlight on the valley floor, and a road running parallel with it. The dirt road they were following clung to the mountainside for a couple more miles or so, passing a deep gorge into which a waterfall was plummeting, but then descended to join the other road at the midpoint of the valley. There was something at the junction of the two roads but from this distance he could not tell if it was a low building, a vehicle or something else.

‘This is where we need to ditch the car before the road starts dropping down and then strike off back up the mountainside,’ said Scouse.

‘Then that gorge ahead might do as a car graveyard,’ Harper said. ‘There looks to be plenty of vegetation growing in it so with luck, it might finish up out of sight.’

He slowed as they approached the gorge, crossed by a rickety-looking iron bridge floored with thick baulks of timber. It had no guard rail and was only a little wider than the Mercedes, but large boulders were blocking the way to the gorge on the near side so they had to inch their way across before coming to a halt on the far side with the nose of the Merc a few feet from the start of the sheer drop down into the gorge.

‘Grab the maps and your water bottle,’ Harper said, ‘and then let’s go.’ He switched off the engine, left the handbrake off and waited until Scouse was out of the car before grabbing his backpack and jumping out himself. At once they began to give the Merc a push, grunting with the effort. As soon as it started to move, they stepped back and watched as it rolled slowly on, then toppled over the edge, and began to plummet down, gathering speed as it fell. However, it had only crashed down fifty feet or so before it came to a halt against a huge boulder with a sickening thud. ‘Damn it! But it’ll have to do,’ Harper said. ‘And with luck, unless you’re actually peering down into the gorge, you probably won’t catch sight of it anyway. Right, let’s move.’

They jogged about a hundred yards along the road, then branched off onto a faint track with a dense growth of plants and grasses along it, suggesting that few, if any, people had come this way in quite some time. Harper kept scanning the mountainside above them and when he saw a place where the gradient eased a little, he led Scouse off the track and up through the fringes of the rainforest. They had covered only a couple of hundred yards when they heard the sound of an engine on the road below them and the rattle of timbers and metal as it began to cross the bridge over the gorge.

‘Down!’ Harper said, dropping flat into the soil and humus of the forest floor. The sour odour of decaying leaves filled his nostrils as he heard Scouse drop beside him. They waited, every sense focussed on the sound of the vehicle below them. It seemed to take an eternity to cross the bridge but after a heart-stopping pause as it slowed right down, it accelerated away again and a moment later, through the thick vegetation, Harper caught a glimpse of one of the cartel Landcruisers, with four gunmen still perched in the back. It passed by without stopping and disappeared down the dirt road.

Harper’s heart rate slowed as he got to his knees and crouched, watching the red glow of the Landcruiser’s brake-lights flickering through gaps in the foliage each time it slowed for the sharp bends, as it headed down the mountain side towards the junction with the other road. When it reached that point a couple of minutes later, it came to a halt next to another vehicle. The occupants jumped out and must have had a hasty consultation in which, no doubt, the driver of the vehicle that had been waiting at the junction would reveal that no other cars had come down that road for some time. A moment later the Landcruiser began a three-point turn.

‘We’ve got to get moving again,’ Harper said, ‘because they’ll be coming back up now, looking for traces of where we left the road. We need to be out of sight before they get back to the bridge and realise where we’ve dumped the car.’

He led the way through the edge of the rainforest, using it for cover but not wanting to descend any lower into it, since every metre of height they lost now would only have to be regained later when they began to climb back up the mountain in earnest. Within a few minutes, they heard the sicarios ’ Landcruiser returning, driving much more slowly, and they again flattened themselves into the soil and leaf litter, remaining motionless until it had passed by.

As soon as its engine note had faded, Harper led the way on through the jungle, using a path so faint that he might have taken it for an animal track, had he not spotted a few stray, yellowing coca leaves lying in the dirt. He had seen no coca plants in this area so the leaves could only have been lost by human drug mules when the bulky bundles of leaves they were carrying to a jungle lab somewhere had snagged on low-hanging tree branches as they passed underneath them.

In the small clearings where one of the rainforest’s giant trees had fallen or been felled, hummingbirds were flitting through the patches of bright sunlight, feeding on the nectar of exotic flowers, but Harper had no eyes for the beauty of the scene, only for the way ahead and whatever dangers it might contain. He moved on even more cautiously, signalling Scouse to stay quiet, certain that there must be a jungle cocaine processing laboratory somewhere not far ahead of them. The dense vegetation meant that they could see only a few yards ahead but they kept their ears pricked for any sound of activity or people moving through the rainforest towards them, and paused to listen in absolute silence every few yards before moving on again.