Guatemala – Journey into Evil
Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But will the SAS locate their target and make it out of the jungle alive?In the Central American republic of Guatemala, government-sponsored torture and mass murder has reduced the Mayan Indian population to a despairing acquiescence. After five hundred years of struggle it seems as if the conqueror’s peace can at last be proclaimed in the capital.Then a guerrilla leader who the authorities have long believed dead springs mysteriously back to life. No loyal Guatemalan can identify him, and the government is compelled to seek help elsewhere, from one of the two SAS soldiers who helped mediate a hostage crisis with the guerrilla almost fifteen years earlier.To the government in Whitehall it appears a straightforward enough exercise, but for the soldier and his comrades the mission soon turns into a nightmare of impossible choices. The land of Guatemala, magical and cruel by turns, will prove much easier to enter than to escape…
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Guatemala â Journey into Evil
DAVID MONNERY
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph © Collaboration JS / Arcangel Images
David Monnery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008155452
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155469
Version: 2015-11-04
Tomás Xicay reached out a hand to shake his sister by the shoulder, then hesitated for several seconds, reluctant to disturb the rare serenity of her face. In the thin wash of moonlight seeping down through the forest canopy she looked almost a child once more, and seeing her like that he felt threatened by an avalanche of memories. Emelia was now a woman of twenty-two, but she had been only eight, and he fourteen, when both had been orphaned by their motherâs murder, and Tomás doubted whether he would ever shake the sense of paternal love and obligation which he still felt for his sister.
He smiled to himself and shook Emeliaâs shoulder. Her eyes opened at once, and her head lifted off the Spanish grammar she had been using as a pillow. The condition of the bookâs cover, streaked with layers of dirt and warped by damp, suggested that this was far from the first time that it had been pressed into such service.
âItâs time,â he whispered.
âRight.â She pulled herself into a sitting position, conscious of the activity in the shadows around her. She felt hungry, but that was nothing unusual.
As if in response to the feeling, Tomás handed her a peanut-butter cracker. âThereâs only two more left,â he said.
âI canât wait for breakfast,â she replied wryly, easing herself on to her haunches and nibbling at the cracker.
He grinned, ruffled her hair, and moved on to check out the rest of the unit. âReady?â he asked each compañero and compañera. Some grunted assent, some offered a nervous âyesâ, some gave him only a grim smile.
Two minutes later the column of thirteen was on the move, threading its way down through the trees. Each âcompaâ concentrated on keeping the correct distance behind whomever he or she was following, short enough not to lose contact in the dark, long enough to maximize the number of survivors if the unit walked into an ambush. All around them the forest lay in virtual silence â there was no breeze to stir the branches, and most of the wildlife was holding its breath while the humans went by. Only the bats seemed indifferent to the guerrillasâ passage, and every now and then Emelia could hear the dry rustle of wings or see a dark shape glide across a small patch of moonlit sky. She loved times like this, when the natural world seemed to reach out and embrace her with its wonders.
Fifty metres further down the trail, Tomás was thinking about what awaited them in the small town of Tubiala, some six kilometres and ninety minutes away. He had every confidence in the Old Manâs abilities as a tactician and a strategist, but his own experience over the past five years had prepared him to expect the unexpected, which could be anything from a sprained ankle to the loss of half a unit.
The threat of sudden death was hardly inviting, but what Tomás dreaded far more was that his sister should be taken alive, and should suffer before death in the terrible way that their mother had suffered. Sometimes this fear would wake him with a dreadful start in the forest, and he would only just stop himself crying out. At such moments he would want to take Emelia back across the mountains and into Mexico, away from this land which had already brought their family such pain. But the sunrise always brought hope to set against the fear, and in any case he knew she would never agree to leave. This land was their home, to live or die for.
