A cacophony of voices outside our holding cell jolted me awake. I bolted upright in the mosquito net and strained to listen. There were shouts. Unintelligible phrases repeated over and over. The voices were angry as a lynch mob. And they were coming closer.
I realized in that instant that my hunch about our passports had been wrong. Very wrong. The immigration official had taken our papers with him into the village, and somebody had identified us as Americans. It was just a matter of moments until the guerillas would arrive at the door. As they stormed the building, a couple of them would inventory the goods that we had carried into their jungle. Our packs would be looted before we had even been dragged outside. They would jab at our kidneys with their rusty gun barrels and march us to the river’s edge. They’d force us to kneel in the soft cool sand and admit we were Americans. They would execute Matt first so that I could translate. Ammunition was expensive. A single bullet to the temple. I would make a desperate lunge for the executioner, but would be felled by a succession of gun-butts to my head. If they did things right our bodies would never be found. It would be six months before our disappearance would rate a paragraph in the B-section of the Panama News.
The voices outside now grew in number and intensity. I slid my machete from its sheath and muffled the sound of the zipper as I crept into the raw darkness of the room. I envisioned the encroaching mob, tried to guess its size. I held the machete behind my back so that the steel would not reflect any light from their torches.
Matt was still asleep. Through the tent I kicked his shoulder. He shuddered and raised his head, wide-awake. He heard the mob. I saw the regret in his wide eyes as the realization hit him. I flashed my machete to direct him to grab his own. Then I nodded toward the door, and hissed, “Get ready.”
There was no fear. Only the harsh reality that we were, inevitably, about to die. How many of them could we take with us?
We stood with our backs pressed against either side of the doorjamb and waited.
(From Chapter 12 of CROSSING THE GAP)
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