Code name, p.3
Code Name, page 3
The view through the doorway told me the hut was well positioned. It stood within the fringe of dense jungle, so it could not be detected by an aircraft flying low and slow overhead – even though none did. The man had cleverly woven the fronds in such a way that they protruded in every direction, shedding rain and breaking up the shelter’s outline – a neat job of camouflage.
A man who wanted to hide had found a perfect place to do it: not just an uninhabited plot of ground, but a forbidden island. One never visited, either because of superstition or because the threat of a prison sentence kept people away.
Who was he and why was it so important that he not be discovered? Everything I saw testified that I had stumbled onto a dangerous secret, one that had been meticulously guarded until now. And this man, whoever he was, had already let me know that I would never leave the island alive.
That meant only two things – I live out the rest of my life on the island as this man’s companion, or die trying to escape. Of course, I might succeed at getting away. But I needed time to plan. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how much time I had left.
Even in the dim light, his eyes were hauntingly visible. “What do I call you?” I asked. “If I’m going to talk with you at all, it would be helpful to have a name to call you.”
“I’m not sure you’re going to live long enough for a name to be important.”
“People know I’m here, people in the Mexican government. If I don’t return on schedule, they’ll come looking for me.”
His eyes turned cold as an ice pick. “I know all about why you’re here, Dr Knight. I know about Dr Menendez and about your assignment. I know you have thirty days. Nobody will come looking for you before then. I seriously doubt that anybody will come looking for you even if you never show up. They will figure you have become a victim of the curse. This place is forbidden. No one will risk the plagues just for you.”
“How do you know all this?”
He shrugged. “I have been to your tent.”
“So, you raided my camp, went through my personal stuff.”
He stared hard at me. “In my opinion, you have trespassed into my territory, so I have a right. This island is off limits. That’s exactly why I chose this place. It’s safe.”
“Safe from what?” I probed.
“People.”
There was a long silence before he spoke again. He stared into space, apparently deep in thought, and I wondered what was going on in his mind. After several minutes, he spoke again, but this time his voice had less edge to it.
“Actually, it will be good to have someone to talk with. You can fill me in on what’s been happening out there.” He waved as if indicating the world at large.
“Right,” I snapped, “you hold me hostage, threaten to kill me, and I’m supposed to serve as some kind of walking Wall Street Journal while you kick back in your hammock and ask all the questions? I don’t think so, mister. I’m here to do a job, and it’s time I got to it.” I began to rise from the mat.
“Sit down!” his voice thundered. His eyes blazed as he jumped from the hammock and stood over me, waving his fist like a club. “I have not survived on this island just to have some punk kid like you come along and ruin everything. You will do it my way and perhaps live a little longer, or we can finish our conversation right now.”
We stared at each other. He never blinked. My eyes dried out and stung like they were filled with hot needles, yet he never blinked.
“You threaten me,” I said, “but you have no weapons that I can see.”
“None that you can see. That is right.” His voice calmed. “But believe me when I tell you that I do not need weapons in my hands. One does not pass through what I have and survive without certain capabilities. It would be extremely foolish of you to test me on this point.”
He exhaled deeply, as if releasing pressure from a boiler, and then turned away and returned to the hammock. “Now, tell me what’s been happening.”
I sat cross-legged on the mat and leaned back against the wall. What choice did I have? Maybe it was better to stay on his good side until I could work out the details of my escape.
“All right,” I sighed, “where do I start? How many years have you been gone from out there?” I waved my arm, mimicking him.
He caught the sarcasm, and glowered with eyes of steel. “Do not mock! You have nothing to gain by it, and everything to lose.”
I tried to match his stare, in an attempt to show my own resolve, but I’m not sure I succeeded.
Then he spoke again. “I ask the questions, you don’t! You just start somewhere, and I’ll tell you if I want more.”
I exhaled the breath I’d been holding. “Okay, after the Berlin Wall was torn down …”
“The Berlin Wall … down?” He jumped off the hammock, excitement in his voice. “What are you talking about?”
“The Wall is down.” I croaked, surprised by his reaction. “Everybody knows that.”
“The whole thing?”
It never occurred to me that there was anyone on earth who didn’t know about the Wall. “The whole thing. Sit back down and I’ll tell you about it.” I motioned toward the hammock and was surprised at how easily he took the suggestion.
“More than just the Wall, the whole concept is down: communism has fallen. Well, not everywhere, but there is no more Eastern Europe the way it once was. No more Soviet Union.”
I spoke slowly. I could see he was having a hard time with this. Not difficulty understanding the words, but a hard time comprehending what had happened since he had left civilization.
He erupted from the hammock again. “You’re lying!” he shouted. A blood vessel bulged on his forehead, stretching diagonally from his eyebrow to the hairline. It made him look wicked. “Don’t you lie to me, or I’ll kill you right now!”
I sat firm. “What would I have to gain by lying about something like that?”
He paced back and forth. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Why would you lie to me about that?”
He stopped, bent down and shoved his face within inches of my own. His breath was hot, his eyes aflame when he asked again, this time in a low, cold voice that hissed between gritted teeth, “Why would you lie to me about that?”
Intimidating as he was, I decided it was time that I stood my ground. I’d seen enough of the world to understand that bullies stay in power only because weaker people allow it.
With the strongest eyes I could produce, I stared back. Then I steadied my breathing and spoke with the deepest conviction I could muster. “Back off, or I won’t tell you another thing. And don’t call me a liar again, or you won’t hear another word out of my mouth. What I have told you is true.”
He considered my words for a long moment, staring, his hot breath on my face, then slowly he backed away. It was as if he finally understood that what I was saying might really have happened.
“All right,” he huffed, “tell me what brought down communism.”
Small as it was, I knew this was a moment of submission on his part. He was finally willing to concede to me the upper hand in the conversation. Without intending to do so, he had handed me a certain indefinable power.
It was a signal that now was the time to quit being the captive victim and start making a show of strength. Without that, I’d never have a chance of survival. Besides, what did I have to lose? If he meant to kill me, it was only a matter of time. He was hungry for information from the outside, and I intended to use that as a bargaining chip. It was all I had.
“No,” I said, just as he was settling back on the hammock.
His eyes opened wide with surprise.
“You don’t believe what I say, even if it is the truth.” I stood and moved in close. “Apologize. I won’t have you call me a liar.”
We stood eye to eye, glaring at each other. Neither of us blinked. I expected to feel the cold point of a knife in the stomach, or something equally terrible. It never came.
What came was an unexpected softening in those gray eyes. He blinked. I knew he was scrambling with his thoughts to get a grip on what was happening.
A long silence followed. Then his eyes re-focused and regained their intensity. But the chill in his gaze was gone. “All right, I’m sorry,” he said. “If you are truly an honest man, I am sorry for calling you a liar. I haven’t known very many …” His words trailed off as he lay back on the hammock.
At that moment, I had no way of knowing the dreadful treatment this man had endured at the hands of those he had once considered to be friends. His relentless fight for survival had dissolved his trust in the honesty of others and had put a jagged edge on him. Now he was being asked to accept that perhaps there were still honest men in the world. It was something he had long since quit believing.
As I sank back to my place on the mat, he motioned to me. “Here, sit in the chair. You’ll be more comfortable.”
“What difference does my comfort make,” I asked defiantly, “if you’re going to kill me?”
I was pushing my luck. But having seen a hint of humanity in those gray eyes, I believed it was a risk worth taking. If I were to have any chance of survival, I had to gain his respect and deal man to man on a basis of trust. It was time to force his hand – time to discover what he had in mind for me.
And my logic was unassailable. What difference did it make whether or not I was momentarily comfortable, if death at his hand was inevitable? He motioned me toward the chair. I hesitated until finally he nodded toward the chair once more.
Rising from the mat, I stepped past the fire pit to the lone seat. It was carefully made, an object of true craftsmanship. Each piece of wood had been meticulously shaped then hand rubbed to a smooth finish. Wood had been thinly split, shaved and woven to make the seat bottom and back. Everything was pegged and lashed together with care, and the chair’s simple strength and beauty said something about the man who made it.
Here was evidence that this man had an unusual background. Nobody who was raised and schooled in the suburban United States would have been exposed to such workmanship as this. Where did he learn such a craft? Why did a man who was exposed to these skills end up hiding on a remote island in the western Caribbean?
Before sitting, I ran my hand over the wood and weaving. “Beautiful workmanship; I wish I could make something as nice as this.”
“You could,” he said. “I believe you could, if you’d had a grandfather like mine. He was a good teacher. Now, please continue. Tell me what happened to the Berlin Wall.”
I drew a deep breath and began slowly.
“It was 1989. Hungary opened her doors to the West. That spelled the beginning of the end of the Berlin Wall. East Germans were free to migrate to other communist states such as Hungary. Now that Hungary was allowing people to cross into Western Europe, all the East Germans had to do was travel to Hungary and then flee to the West.”
Through the afternoon, I told him about the demonstrations in Leipzig that spawned reform in East Germany. I talked about the announcement that the border with West Berlin would be opened for limited trips abroad. I told him that almost immediately, people calling themselves ‘wall woodpeckers’ started using hammers and chisels to knock off pieces of the wall. That was quickly followed by a massive emigration of East Berliners to West Berlin.
He sat spellbound.
I told how the checkpoints were opened for pedestrians at Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenberg Gate, and how finally in the summer of 1990 East and West Germany were united and the Wall was dismantled.
I stopped there and waited for him to respond. He just stared into the distance, his mouth half open, almost as if he were in a trance.
“Are you okay?”
He blinked, closed his jaw and whispered, “Amazing.” Then he re-focused his eyes on me. “You say that was in 1990. Let me ask you this … what happened after 1983?”
I was astonished. Was he saying he had been on Xulakan since 1983?
“In 1983, I was only a kid.”
He nodded. “Tell me what you have read in history books, then. Tell me what made the headlines. Surely you must know some of what went on.”
And so it began. Each day the man came to the hut, brought me food and water from my supplies in the tent, and we talked from sunrise until after dark. He allowed me outside only to exercise and to visit the latrine he had dug a short distance away in the jungle. But I was never permitted to return to my tent or to the Zodiac. If I needed something from there, he would bring it to me.
Where he went each day after he left me was a mystery. Obviously, he had another camp somewhere else on the island, because he left me alone in the hut from about nine o’clock each evening until sun-up the next morning.
Only once did I attempt an escape. It was on the third night, after he had left the hut. I waited until one-thirty in the morning, when I felt certain that, wherever he was, he would be asleep.
I crept from the hut and used moonlight and constellations to guide me in the direction where I believed I would find my camp and the Zodiac. Slowly, silently I moved through the jungle. It took an hour of stealthy searching then I finally broke onto a beach. Luck was with me. In the dim light of the partial moon, I saw the Zodiac on the sand fifty yards away.
Hunched over, to reduce my shadowy profile, I ran to the boat, pushed it off into the water, climbed aboard and lowered the motor into position.
“I thought you said you were an honest man,” his familiar voice boomed from back in the trees. “I thought you said I could trust you.”
I slumped into the bottom of the boat. “Well, I never promised I wouldn’t try to escape.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I admit you never told me that.”
He stepped into the water, grabbed the bow line and dragged the boat back up onto the sand. “You wouldn’t have gotten far,” he said, flipping something up and down in his hand.
“What’s that?”
“Your spark plug.”
I watched the spark plug tumble through the air as he flipped then caught it. “So, you didn’t trust me. I knew you didn’t trust me!”
“Well, you never promised you wouldn’t try to escape.” He smiled. “Actually, I would have done the same.” He looked at me as if waiting for something.
“I can’t promise that I won’t try to escape.”
Without a word, he closed his fist around the spark plug.
“I understand,” I said, “I would do the same.”
Each day, I searched my memory, dug out a few notable events and recounted in chronological order what had been happening in the world since he had left it behind. Nine days after I began, we reached the point where I told him what had happened on September 11, 2001 when the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had been targeted by suicide terrorists flying hijacked commercial airplanes. I explained the subsequent hunt for a man named Osama bin Laden and his worldwide terrorist network called al-Qaeda.
His face suddenly drained of color then he exploded with rage. But this time, he didn’t accuse me of lying. When he quit screaming at the sky, he sank back and stared at me, long and unblinking.
When finally he spoke, he muttered, “You cannot understand.”
“Understand what?”
“What you have told me confirms my worst fears. The world is in terrible danger.”
“The war against terrorism continues until this day,” I told him. “America and her allies are doing all they can.”
“It will never end.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because I know who taught Osama bin Laden how to organize, fund and conduct terrorist campaigns. Even if bin Laden is captured or killed, it won’t matter. His network is bottomless and, at the same time, reaches the highest levels of government. Trust me. This I know.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Pages 19–27, notebook #1
March 20 – A day for hope
It seems like a miracle that I can now sit somewhat calmly and write in this notebook the story of what has happened during my past two weeks on Xulakan.
Suffice it to say I’m still alive.
The story I am about to tell is far more fascinating than the original reason for my coming to this forbidden island. A study of the plants and animals here pales in comparison with the story of the man with the gray eyes.
His name is Mark Benton.
He will never be able to return to his former life in the United States. Even though most people outside the intelligence community have never heard of him, his story needs to be told to set aright the official version of his disappearance. It also needs to be told to expose a deadly secret.
Unfortunately, even as I write this, I fear that it might never see the light of day. Many people have died in an attempt to keep this information from getting out. And there are powerful men who would kill again to keep the secret.
I am but a scribe of this man’s story. I wrote it as he told it to me. Always, when he came to the hut, he took to the hammock and I sat on the chair with a notepad on my lap.
Three years after graduation from Stoddard University with a degree in political science, Mark Benton found himself deep in trouble and running for his life. He hadn’t planned it. Nobody ever plans for life to go down the toilet. But sometimes it just works out that way.
“I majored in political science,” Mark said, “because I was fascinated by the workings of politics. Things happen in politics that are hard for the average citizen to understand. People rise out of obscurity and come to positions of incredible power. Everyone has secrets to keep, and the only way to keep them is to bend to the will of others who know the secrets as well. In less polite circles, it’s called blackmail.”
