The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 53

Did I ever tell you about the time I was kidnapped by Argentinian bandits? I was a businessman, which was to say I was taking the profits from a company while other people did the legwork and feeding most of my resources into the Cronus Club, as befitted the basic tenets of the institution. I was living in Argentina and, rather naïvely, had assumed that I was keeping my head down and causing very little trouble.

I was kidnapped while driving to market. They were rather unprofessional about it, taking my car out with a sideswipe that overturned it and could well have killed me then and there. As it was, I dislocated my shoulder and cracked a couple of ribs, and considered myself lucky to have done no worse.

As I crawled from the wreckage of my car, two men in ski masks came barrelling out of the pickup which had swiped me on the potholed road, grabbed me by an arm each and, screaming, “Shut up, shut up!” in heavily accented English, dragged me into the rear of their vehicle. The whole escapade can’t have taken more than twenty-five seconds.

I was too groggy and confused to do anything other than obey, and lay face down with my hands above my head for the duration of the journey, where under more prepared or kinder circumstances I might well have made a better strategic assessment of my kidnappers. I was aware by the increasingly poor roads and rapidly rising humidity that we were heading into forest and felt no particular surprise when we finally came to a stop in a small round clearing of no discernible merit and I was pushed to a mud floor shimmering with larvae. They bound my hands with rope and covered my head with a cloth that stank heavily of roasted coffee, and dragged me through the forest. As will happen when you have a bewildered, injured, blindfolded prisoner on rough paths, I only made it a few miles before I tripped and sprained my ankle. A row ensued as to what to do with me next, and eventually a rough stretcher was cobbled together from crooked branches that stuck into my spine as they pulled me to their camp. There, to my great disappointment, the ski masks came off, and I was crudely shackled with a rusted chain to a post set in the ground. A newspaper carrying the day’s date was laid at my feet, a photo taken and, eavesdropping on to the gabble of my hosts, I discovered that a ransom for some $300,000 was to be demanded.

My company could have paid the fee ten times over, but, listening to my captors, who still hadn’t realised that I spoke a word of Spanish, I concluded that it was unlikely I would live to enjoy the cost-benefit analysis. As they clearly considered me a weak foreign businessman, I played the part, groaning as my shoulder and ankle began to swell against my clothes. It took very little play-acting, for they’d shackled my sprained ankle to the post and very quickly the flesh was pressing against the metal in hot, throbbing agony. Eventually, realising that a dead hostage was a useless hostage, they unshackled me and gave me a crutch to walk on, and a boy, barely fifteen years old, took me down to the nearby stream to wash my face and neck. He had a Kalashnikov, the universal weapon of all budget warriors, but he could barely hold it and I doubted if he knew how to fire the thing properly. I collapsed into the stream and, when he came to check on me, hit him round the side of the head with my crutch, beat him into submission and drowned him beneath the thin, shallow water, sitting on his spine and pressing my elbow into the back of his skull with all the weight and strength I had.

Examining my surroundings and my damaged leg, it seemed unlikely that escape would happen, and I resolved that, since I would almost certainly die in this place, I may as well die by the means of my choosing. So I limped back to the camp, preparing to go out in a blaze of glory. Somewhat embarrassingly, the first guard I came upon was having a piss by some trees and, while my sense of professionalism suggested merely snapping his neck and being done with it, I was, I concluded, not exactly SAS competent. Instead, I shot him in the buttocks, and as he screamed and the others came running, I got down on my belly and shot out the kneecaps of the first man to come into view.

To my surprise, no one else came.

Then a voice called out in broken English, “We do not want fight you!”

I replied in Spanish. “You don’t appear to have a choice.”

A pause while this information settled in. Then, “We’ll leave the map and water–clean water! And food. We’ll leave you the map, water, food. We’ll wait twenty-four hours. That will give you time to get to the truck. We’ll not follow! You take the map!”

I called back, “That’s very kind of you, but really, if you don’t mind, I think I’d rather just slog it out here and now, thank you very much.”

“No, no, no need!” he called back, and really, I was beginning to doubt the commitment of these bandits to their task. “We’ll wait twenty-four hours and go. Won’t bother you again. Good luck!”

I heard the sound of movement between the leaves, of metal things being overturned, footsteps heading away.

I must have lain there for an hour, an hour and a half, waiting for the end. The forest stirred. Ants crawled into my shirt and considered eating me, but I clearly wasn’t their choice of meal, and they crawled on. A snake slithered through the undergrowth nearby but was more afraid of me than I was of it. Dusk began to settle, and there was silence in the camp. Even the man whose kneecaps I had removed was silent. Perhaps I’d hit the femoral artery. Perhaps the pain had become too great to bear. At last, boredom more than anything else and a recollection that death was not my primary concern here pushed me to my feet, and, rifle in one hand and crutch in the other, I limped into the camp.

It was indeed deserted.

A map, water canteen and tin of cooked beans had been carefully laid out on the central table, along with a handwritten note.

The note said, in English,

“Many, many apologies.”

That was all.

I put the canteen over my shoulder, the map in my pocket and began the slow limp back to civilisation.

Whoever the bandit was, he had told the truth. I was never to see him again.