“Left!” Kor shouted as he dropped onto the same perfectly formed wave I had begun to paddle for. His large white surfboard covered with red and oranges flames raced to the bottom of the heavy wave that crested up and curled over, tumbling into a foamy mass behind him. I floated over the cresting wave sitting up on the surfboard I had bought the day before for a hundred dollars. It had a couple of dings and the sun had discolored it, but the board served its purpose. I watched the big man turn his surfboard, gradually climbing to the center of the wave as he built speed. Kor pumped the surfboard along the wall of water staying ahead of the breaking wave.
“Whooooyeaaaaaa!” he hollered as he raced by. I whistled as he shot his surfboard up the face of the wave and snapped it around in a sharp lip turn that forced the three fins sideways, flaying a spray of mist off the lip of the wave. “Oh, yeah!” Hoyt Duros cried out. The New Zealander dug his arms into the salt water, paddling his surfboard out to meet the next mound of water that grew, pitching up as it approached us.
Sets had rolled in regularly since we arrived nearly an hour and a half earlier at eleven a.m.
“It’s all yours, wanker!” Markus yelled out. Hoyt paddled and kicked, wriggling up enough speed in front of the breaking wave to catch it. The swell peaked and began to crash. He popped up, cutting across it. He drew out a long wide turn at the bottom of the wave and shot up the face, launching off the lip of the wave.
Suspended momentarily in the air, the wave crashed beneath him. Gravity pulled Hoyt down onto a bed of foam. He pulled off the floater and slashed the wave a couple more times as it started to reform.
I paddled out to meet the next swell.
Punta Hermosa, a tiny beach town fifty minutes south of Lima, was renowned for its world-class surf. There were no families or packs of smarmy teenagers hanging out on the beaches. It was only the four of us and the waves; waves that channeled into a cove, causing them to break beautifully to the right and left.
Kor had kept his promise. That Wednesday morning, during my first week off, we loaded his dented-up Pathfinder with sleeping bags, surfboards, wetsuits, food and beer, and sped south along the barren Pan-American Highway. We raced past adobe huts that were set back from the highway, constantly battered by hot wind that swept desert sand into them. Black smoke lifted off trash fires burning outside many of the huts, leaving a sharp chemical stink in the air.
Another set of waves started to roll in. I lifted and pulled my arms through the cold water; my shoulders burned under the wetsuit I had picked up for an additional fifty dollars at the board shop. I paddled hard towards the next growing wave. The first in the set had pitched up and began to break. I duck-dived the wave, surfacing through the backside of it and paddled on for the next in line.
“I’m heading in,” Markus called out. He paddled onto the wave. I continued my charge out through the set. Markus jumped up on his board and glided across the wave. A third wave mounded up and grew as though some great creature was surfacing below the water. I sat up and turned my board to shore. With the last of my energy, I paddled, driving the board out in front of the growing wave. The wave picked up my surfboard in its palm. I stood as it tried to close down on me.
Shooting down the face, I used the momentum to cut back up the wave, and a hollow, thundering sound opened behind me. I looked back and found the wave barreling, forming a tube of rolling water. I dragged my fingers through the face of the wave, slowing the board’s momentum, and squatted down. The wave caught up and covered me. It sucked me back into its hollow.
Inside, the sun glinted through the top of the wave. A great rumbling bellowed through the tube, and wind gushed, spraying water past me. So this is what it’s like to be in the green room, I thought. With a final heave, the wave spat me out and the barrel closed. The raging wave tired and slopped the rest of its way to shore.
“Wicked show, mate,” Markus said. I headed up the beach to him. “Was it your first time?” The left side of his mouth curled up and the crooked smile fell into place. I nodded and slapped his outstretched hand, set down my board, unzipped the back of the wetsuit and commenced to peel it off.
“Let’s have a look at it then,” Hoyt said as he toweled off. I peeled off the black rash guard and turned my back to him. “Now that’s a mother-fucking tattoo!” he said and slapped me on the shoulder.
“Right?” I said and laughed. “Bastards got me shitfaced and inked up.”
I told Hoyt how Kor and Markus had taken me to Larco Mar, a modern, multi-level, outdoor shopping mall set up on a cliff on Lima’s west side that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. The owner of the tattoo parlor, who Kor claimed to be the best tattoo artist in all of Peru, had made special arrangements to do his fifteenth tattoo from the Nasca Lines genre. At eleven-thirty on Monday morning, Markus began to feed me shots of tequila, promising that the alcohol would help.
“I wanted the condor on my back,” I said to Hoyt. “No longer than four inches. But then the tequila hit.” For hours the needle had hummed like a tireless metallic bee, digging its stinger into me over and over, inking the outline of the condor found out on the Nasca pampa. It covered most of my back.
Up at the small cevicheria across the street from the beach, the four of us ordered beer with our lunch. We took handfuls of the baked and salted corn kernels set on the table as we waited for the waitress to serve us our plates of white fish and seafood that they cured with lime juice and seasoned with spicy rocoto peppers. I sat back in my chair and enjoyed the sun.
“So how’d it go?” Hoyt asked, after he washed down a handful of baked corn with beer. “Bringing the bananas out of the jungle, I mean.” The dimple in his chin made him look tough, contrasting the boyish-looking fine blonde hair. Hoyt had flown into Lima that morning. Kor mentioned that he was back from Ecuador on business.
“It was easy,” I said and grabbed another handful of the crunchy corn. “Nobody noticed a thing.”
The plates loaded with ceviche came out and were swung down in front of us. We ordered more liter bottles of Cusqueña and dug into lunch.
“Cuchillo was right, about the security and whatnot?” Markus asked.
“Security?” I asked and shook my head as I chewed. “There is no security.” I swallowed some beer. Although I had already told Kor and Markus most parts about my jungle mission earlier in the week, I was ready to formally debrief them. “I let my nerves get to me for a minute,” I said. “Even during the ride downstream to Puerto Maldonado I considered dropping the backpack overboard into the river and be done with it.”
“Right so. I told you he was good, didn’t I?” Markus said, and looked at Kor and then Hoyt.
I took another couple of bites and explained how the four kilos of cocaine I had carried downstream had given me a heightened awareness of my surroundings and who circled into and out of them. A second time I had considered dumping my daypack during the ten-minute ride through Puerto Maldonado to the airport.
Once inside the airport, the option to abort would be gone. But the adrenaline had pushed me on. My five tourists and I approached the ticket counter. We handed over our tickets and checked our luggage. Some national policemen wandered aimlessly outside through the parking lot, paying no close attention to anything except for the cigarettes they smoked and the conversations they were sharing. Occasionally, one would meander into the small building, eyeball the tourists and locals lined up at the counters for a couple seconds, and head back out to smoke another cigarette.
We paid our airport tax and stood in another line that filed past an attendant checking boarding passes and identification before entering the departure lounge. Unlike other airports throughout Peru, Puerto Maldonado didn’t have a metal detector to walk through or an x-ray machine to scrutinize the contents of the carryon bags.
It was no wonder Harold Weber had been so sure we would make small fortunes. If no one cared about the content of our bags, why wouldn’t we bring cocaine out of the jungle? I told the others that once in the departure lounge my nerves settled and the jitters calmed down. I realized the genius of the Amplified’s operation.
“Ridiculous how easy it is,” Hoyt said. I took another bite of lunch and chewed it. “Halfway through the flight I had forgotten that I had the bananas with me,” I said. “When we landed in Lima, I remembered them when I saw the police standing around chatting with each other inside the arrival gate. They only noticed me when one of my tourists, a blond woman, stood by my side. You remember Jeanette, don’t you, Estrella?” Markus nodded and scooped another bite of ceviche into his mouth.
“Police are such horny bastards,” Hoyt said and shook his head. “They always crack a fat one for the gringas.”
I laughed. “We walked out of the airport after collecting our bags and loaded into our transfer to the hotel. It was as easy as anything.”
I had found the most difficult part of smuggling cocaine into Lima was coming down off of the adrenaline high. After we made it out of the jungle and back to Lima, checked into our hotel, rested, and cleaned up, we headed out for our farewell dinner that evening. All five of my travelers had early flights back home the next morning. We said our good-byes by ten p.m., and they disappeared up the stairs to their rooms. Exhaustion should have crippled me. After all, we had gotten up at four a.m. to leave The Mother of God’s Respite by four thirty. Rather than turning in Sunday night, I hopped into a taxi.
Mainstream, an ex-pat bar that drew a crowd every night of the week – known for attracting easy Peruvian girls – was my only option. Markus and Hoyt smiled and nodded at each other. Each Cuba libre went down a little quicker that night. I couldn’t believe I had carried nearly a hundred thousand dollars of cocaine out of the jungle. “But the cocktails didn’t settle my nerves. Before I knew it, I was shit-faced,” I told them. “A Peruvian girl wearing too much makeup dangled her tits in front of me and then invited me out on the dance floor. After a couple of songs we were mauling each…
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