Twenty-Two
His eyes were open, but he thought he must surely be dreaming. The voices he heard were speaking English—crisp, unaccented American English. After all this time, it was a sound so strange it almost sounded like a foreign tongue to his ears.
There were at least two of them—deep, masculine voices—and they were shouting.
“Show us where it is now, or I’ll blow your head off!”
Nate winced as the man let out a string of profanities. These were not the first words of his native language he’d hoped to hear. He threw off the dirty, coarse cloth that had covered him and sat up on the hard dirt floor of the hut. Peering through the thin slivers of space between the bamboo and grasses that made up his prison, he cocked his head to one side, straining to hear the rest of the exchange.
The thick leaves of a palm tree blocked Nate’s view of the Americans, but he could clearly see the face of the man called Juan Mocoa. He was on his knees before the Americans, and, judging by the tension in his jaw and the raw fear in his eyes, his life was at stake.
“Please, no. I tell you where it is, Captain,” Mocoa squealed. “I give it back. I give it all back, Captain.”
Nate was stunned to hear Mocoa plead for his life in fluent English. He had always been suspicious of Juan Mocoa, for the man seemed to have a vested interest in Nate’s continued imprisonment—though why, Nate could only guess. Now, hearing him speak English, his suspicions were heightened.
If these men were enemies of Mocoa, perhaps, Nate thought, they could help him escape. Then, taking a chance, he shouted at the top of his lungs in English, “Hey! Help me out here! Hey!” His heart was beating so hard in his chest that it frightened him, yet he felt stronger than he had in weeks.
Still peeking through the wall of his hut, he watched one of the Americans step into view and walk toward the sound of his voice, eyes darting to and fro.
“Who said that?” the American shouted. “Where are you, man?”
Even from his inferior vantage point, Nate could see Juan Mocoa’s mind working, plotting to use this interruption to his advantage. But the other American, the one Mocoa called Captain, moved in to stand over him, gun ready, while his partner walked cautiously toward the sound of Nate’s voice.
“Show yourself!” the American bellowed.
Nate struggled to his feet and rattled the door of the hut, afraid to let himself realize how close he might be to freedom. “Here! I’m over here!”
The American turned his rifle on the young native guard who had shrunk down outside Nate’s door as soon as he heard the commotion.
“Open the door,” the American ordered, gesturing roughly with his gun. The youth looked to Juan Mocoa, as if seeking permission. Then, realizing that Mocoa was in no position to give orders, he looked back to the gun and complied, struggling briefly with the vine ropes that served as a lock.
Within seconds Nate was standing before a red-bearded, blue-eyed American.
“Who are you?” the man demanded.
Nate almost couldn’t speak over the lump in his throat. “Nathan Camfield. Dr. Nathan Camfield. I’m a missionary to the Timoné village two days downriver.” Now the words poured out in a rush. “I’ve been held captive here for… What’s the date?”
The man looked at the bulky watch he was wearing. “It’s the sixth.”
“No, what month?”
The American scratched his beard. “How long have you been here, man?”
“I don’t know. I-I’ve lost track. It was late July when I came.”
“July? Are you sure? It’s April.”
Had he been here less than a year? It seemed much longer, a lifetime. “My wife… I left her at Timoné. Can you take me there?”
“Briggs!” he shouted at the man guarding Juan Mocoa. “We’ve got a problem!”
The two men conferred quietly while Nate stood outside his prison hut. Excitement rose in him as he thought of the possibility that these men might be his way out. He guessed—by their coarse language and the fact that they had business with the likes of Juan Mocoa—that they were involved in the lucrative drug trafficking that thrived in the area, but surely their sense of decency would persuade them to help a fellow American.
From their coded conversation Nate surmised that Juan Mocoa had been employed as a courier for their business. Mocoa’s greed had done him in. He had apparently tried to get a piece of the action for himself, and now, in spite of giving up the location of his secret cache, it seemed they didn’t forgive easily.
Nate watched them carefully, knowing that Juan Mocoa’s fate might determine his own. Red Beard started for the river and motioned for Nate to follow him. But before he had taken ten steps, Nate heard the sickening sound of a gunshot fired at close range.
Three hours later, Nate sat in a small flat boat, the putt-putt-putt of the outboard motor the sweetest music his ears had ever heard. He leaned against the filthy canvas tarp at the back of the boat, trying not to think about the heavy bundles the tarp concealed. He might be dreaming, yet never had his dreams conjectured fleeing Chicoro on a boat loaded with cocaine and piloted by drug traffickers. If this was real—and he prayed it was—God did indeed work in mysterious ways.
Juan Mocoa had paid a traitor’s price and now lay rotting on the floor of the rain forest. But the fact that Nate was now on-board this boat seemed to indicate that the Americans had no intention of harming him. Still he understood that his passage with them depended on his silence.
He remembered the way Mocoa had kept his guards well supplied with cigarettes and rum, and he speculated on Juan Mocoa’s motivation to keep him captive in Chicoro. Perhaps because Nate was an American, Mocoa worried that he was sympathetic to the cartel Mocoa had defrauded, the one that now provided Nate passage on this boat. Or perhaps Mocoa simply feared that if Nathan were released, he would report him to the national authorities and ruin his successful little private enterprise.
His mind reeled with all that had happened, and confusion spun a web around his brain. Perhaps he would never know exactly why he had been held here. And yet, as this place of his captivity faded into the distance, one fact gave him peace, one truth made sense of the senseless. He had remained faithful. And he had shared the object of that faith with every villager who had come near his humble prison. Every guard, every youth who delivered a gourd of water or a rice-filled leaf to his hut had heard the name of Jesus. In spite of the language barrier, he had made every effort to point them to the one, true God Almighty. Perhaps that had been God’s purpose in this all along.
As the boat entered the wide part of the river and picked up speed, Nathan began to tremble. A spate of adrenaline and renewed hope coursed through his veins, but he was weak from the extended lack of exercise and proper nutrition and from the ongoing effects of the injuries he had suffered in the fire. As a doctor, he recognized that his health was in a gravely compromised state. He felt panic rising within him at the thought of Daria in captivity. Could she have survived the type of imprisonment he had endured? His mind simply could not sort through all the possibilities.
In the front of the boat, the two Americans shouted back and forth over the drone of the outboard motor, discussing the weather conditions and planning their route. The man called Captain filled out some sort of log, stating the date and the year aloud.
Nathan leaned forward. Surely he hadn’t heard the man correctly. “What did you say today’s date was?” Nathan asked, his heart pounding.
“April sixth.”
“No—I mean, the year.”
Captain repeated the date.
He had heard correctly.
Red Beard looked at his map again and turned to shout back to Nathan. “Looks like Timoné is the wrong direction, Camfield, but if you’re not in a big hurry, we can get you to Bogotá.”
Nathan almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “No rush,” he told them, still wrestling to grasp the man’s matter-of-fact mention of the year—and the stunning realization that he had been in captivity for more than two and a half years.