The fat colonel greeted his visitor in his office with a bottle of whisky.
‘I guess a tad early for me, colonel,’ said McBride.
‘Nonsense, my friend, never too early for a toast. Come . . . I propose. Death to our enemies.’
They drank. McBride, at that hour and in that heat, would have preferred a decent coffee.
‘What have you got for me, colonel?’
‘A little exposition. Better I show you.’
There was a conference room next to the office and it had clearly been arranged for the colonel’s grisly ‘exposition’. The central long table was covered with a white cloth which contained one exhibit. Round the walls were four other tables with collections of mixed items. It was one of the smaller tables that Colonel Moreno approached first.
‘I told you our friend, Mr Watson, first panicked, drove down the main road, swerved up a track at the side and attempted to find escape by driving straight through the jungle? Yes? Impossible. He crashed his off-road into a gully and could not get out. Today, it stands in the yard beneath these windows. Here is part of what he abandoned in it.’
Table One contained mainly heavy-duty clothing, spare boots, water pannikins, mosquito netting, repellent, water-purification tablets.
Table Two had a tent, pegs, lantern, canvas basin on a tripod, miscellaneous toiletries.
‘Nothing I wouldn’t have on any normal camping trip,’ remarked McBride.
‘Quite right, my friend. He obviously thought he would be hiding in the jungle for some time, probably making an ambush for his target on the road out of El Punto. But that target hardly ever leaves by road at all, and when he does it is in an armoured limousine. This assassin was not very good. Still, when he abandoned his kit, he also abandoned this. Too heavy, perhaps.’
At Table Three the colonel whisked a sheet off the contents. It was a Remington Three-Double-O-Six, with a huge Rhino scope sight and a box of shells. Purchasable in American gun stores as a hunting rifle, it would also take a human head away with no problem at all.
‘Now,’ explained the fat man, enjoying his mastery of his list of discoveries, ‘at this point your man leaves the car and eighty per cent of his equipment. He sets off on foot, probably aiming for the river. But he is not a jungle fighter. How do I know? No compass. Within three hundred metres he was lost, heading south into deeper jungle, not west to the river. When we found him, all this was scattered about.’
The last table contained a water can (empty), bush hat, machete, flashlight. There were tough-soled combat boots, shreds of camouflage trousers and shirt, bits of a completely inappropriate seersucker jacket, a leather belt with brass buckle and sheath knife, still looped onto the belt.
‘That was all he was carrying when you found him?’
‘That was all he was carrying when he died. In his panic he left behind what he should have taken. His rifle. He might have defended himself at the end.’
‘So, your men caught up with him and shot him?’
Colonel Moreno threw up both hands, palms forward, in a gesture of surprised innocence.
‘We? Shoot him? Unarmed? Of course not, we wanted him alive. No, no. He was dead by the midnight of the night he fled. Those who do not understand the jungle should not venture into it. Certainly not ill-equipped, at night, seized by panic. That is a deadly combination. Look.’
With self-adoring theatricality he whipped the sheet off the centre table. The skeleton had been brought from the jungle in a body bag, feet still in the boots, rags still around the bones. A hospital doctor had been summoned to rearrange the bones in the right order.
The dead man, or what was left of him, had been picked clean
to the last tiny fragment of skin, flesh and marrow.
‘The key to what happened is here,’ said Colonel Moreno, tapping with his forefinger.
The right femur had been snapped cleanly through the middle.
‘From this we can deduce what happened, my friend. He panicked, he ran. By flashlight only, blindly, without a compass. He made about a mile from the stranded car. Then he caught his foot in a root, a hidden tree stump, a tangled vine. Down he went. Snap. One broken leg.
‘Now, he cannot run, he cannot walk, he cannot even crawl. With no gun he cannot even summon help. He can only shout, but to what end? You know we have jaguars in these jungles?
‘Well, we do. Not many, but if one hundred and fifty pounds of fresh meat insists on shouting its head off, chances are a jaguar will find it. That’s what happened here. The main limbs were scattered over a small clearing.
‘It’s a larder out there. The raccoon eats fresh meat. Also the puma and the coati. Up in the tree canopy the daylight will bring the forest vultures. Ever seen what they can do to a corpse? No? Not pretty, but thorough. At the end of them all, the fire ants.
‘I know about fire ants. Nature’s most fantastic cleaners. Fifty yards from the remains we found the ants’ nest. They leave out scouts, you know. They cannot see, but their sense of smell is amazing, and of course within twenty hours he would have smelt to high heaven. Enough?’