Stephen Leather - Breakout

Two young children who had been playing on the beach right in front of where he had emerged from the water, were watching him, their eyes like saucers. Harper gave them a big smile, and then shot a quick glance back along the shore. There was no sign of any alarm, nor movement towards him from the jetty which now looked to be almost 100 yards away. He turned his head, looking back across the water. The next queue of people waiting to cross was lining up at the jetty on the far side and beyond them he could just make out the figures of the two sicarios, still leaning against the Landcruiser.

He turned back, gave the children another big smile, and then reached into his pocket. He pulled out the few coins he had there and tossed them towards the kids. They fell glittering among the shingle on the beach and the children scrabbled among the pebbles for them, giggling and laughing. Harper got to his feet, ran past them up the beach, around the end of a row of houses and then dived into some scrub behind them. He was still cold to the bone, shivering hard and struggling to focus his mind. He knew that he must be close to hypothermia, so with a quick look around to make sure he was still not being watched, he took off his clothes. He spent a couple of minutes wringing as much water from them as he could and then trying to rub some warmth into his frozen limbs and then put his clothes back on.

He ran up the hillside away from the lake, feeling weak as a child but resisting the siren call from his mind to just sit down for a minute and rest. He knew that if he did that he might not get up again.There were no shouts or sounds of pursuit behind him and when he finally paused to risk a look behind, with his chest heaving, nothing seemed to have changed at the waterfront. Cars and people were still moving slowly to and from the barges, and as far as he could tell, only the two children had paid him any attention, and they were now heading for the shop next to the jetty, presumably to spend their windfall.

Harper turned and rounded the shoulder of the hill. One hurdle had now been safely negotiated but an even more difficult one lay ahead, because although he was now safely across the lake, he was still on Bolivian territory and he could not afford to relax, nor begin to feel safe until he was well across the Peruvian frontier. At its closest point, that still lay twenty miles away.

As he moved on, he kept following the contours around the hillside above Ruta Nacional 2 . It had resumed its course on this side of the lake but ran close to the shore on the narrow coastal plain. The wind off the lake coupled with the body heat he was generating from his exertions was helping to dry Harper’s clothes a little but it was still an hour after he had emerged from the water before he began to feel anything like warm again. He kept forcing himself on, trudging towards the border, trying to ignore his gnawing hunger and the fatigue that dragged at him like a lead weight around his neck.

CHAPTER 23

By mid-afternoon Harper was in sight of the Bolivian frontier post at the village of Kasani, the last obstacle before he could reach Peru. Still on the high ground above the road, he worked his way forward until he reached a point overlooking the village and the border post. There was a cluster of buildings around the border post and a mission-style church with adobe walls and half a dozen stepped concrete benches in front of it, all individually numbered as if to accommodate ticket-holders enjoying the show as people queued to cross the border. A few yards beyond the church was a thin stone arch arcing right over the top of the road that must have been used to mark the actual frontier at some time in the past. To either side of the border post he could see a very new-looking chain-link fence complete with CCTV cameras mounted on poles roughly every couple of hundred metres. Whether they worked or not was another question, and in any case, to Harper’s relief, although the line of CCTV cameras marched right down to the shore of the lake, it did not appear to extend far up the hill on the inland side of the border post.

There were no lounging sicarios nor white Landcruisers parked near the border post, but he knew only too well that it did not mean that the frontier was not being watched. The cartels had people everywhere, not just corrupt police and customs officers in their pay, but mules, look-outs, runners and kids eager to make an impression and be recruited into the cartel’s army. A sighting of any suspicious individual, whether a potential DEA man, a spy, a sicario working for a rival drug lord, or a man on the cartel’s most wanted list, would earn them a reward. So Harper would not be passing through the border post and was merely observing it to work out when, where and how would be the best means to get across.

As he was watching, he saw one of the border officials emerge from the post just long enough to push back the queue of people waiting to have their papers and passports checked before crossing the frontier. The official then went back inside and slammed the door shut, while those outside could only settle down to wait. Harper figured it must be siesta time, which meant it was the perfect time to cross

He began to climb further up the hillside, until he was out of sight of the last of the scattered houses in Kasani and then he turned back towards the border. He crept forward. As he approached the fence he was well up on the hillside and safely out of line of sight from the border post. To his relief, he saw that the fence was not electrified, but it was still an unexpectedly formidable barrier, a steel chainlink fence showing no signs of rust or wear, and capped with a triple strand of razor wire. Keeping low to the ground and still using every scrap of cover, he began tracking the line of the fence up the steep slope, scouring the ground with his gaze, looking for any faint traces of animal tracks. He knew there were viscacha - rodents like rabbits with long tails - and the maned wolves that preyed on them, in this area, so all he had to do was find their tracks. After a couple of false alarms - tracks that appeared to be running towards the border fence but which then either veered away from it again or just ran parallel to it, Harper found what he was seeking. It was another track that was just visible as a slightly fainter line across the yellowing mountain grasses over which it ran. Harper began to track its course over the hillside. He followed it to the fence and smiled as he saw it continuing beyond the fence on the other side. Where it crossed the fence line, there was a shallow depression in the dust and he could see a small tuft of viscacha fur caught on the lowest strand of the wire.

Harper cast a swift glance up and down the fence, making sure there was no one in sight, and then stretched himself out flat on the ground and began to belly crawl his way forward under the fence. He had to turn his head sideways to squeeze through the gap and could feel the bottom wire strand scraping along his spine. He was still not quite halfway under the fence when he became stuck fast, held by the wire that had now become trapped in the back of his jacket. He reached behind him, trying to free it, but in the end he had to wriggle his way backwards from under the fence to free it.

He took off his jacket, knelt at the foot of the fence and began clawing at the dusty, gritty soil with his fingers, scraping some of it away to deepen the shallow depression slightly before trying again. Pushing his jacket in front of him, he slithered back under the fence and this time he felt the wire snag for a moment on his shirt but then slip down his back and he was able to wriggle out on the other side of the fence. He reached back under it, brushing the dirt and grit back into the depression and smoothing away the marks that showed someone had crawled through. When he had finished, he cautiously got to his feet, still sweeping the hillside around him with his gaze to make sure he hadn’t been observed.