OK, time to talk about Peru.
Before I get to that, though, you should know the context.
I told you I first arrived in your era in the year 1988. I looked up a distant relative, emphasized the "distant" part, and talked her into letting me crash on her sofa bed until I could get on my feet. Not the sort of cunning plan you'd expect out of a guy from the future, eh?
You didn't have some get-rich-quick scheme?
Not right away, no. Believe it or not, something like that didn't motivate me at all. I realized that, being in the past, I could affect future events. That's what I cared about the most. But first I had to deal with immediate concerns like eating and sleeping. My relative hooked me up with a job with Cosimo, actually. You know, the one who owned the coffee shop downstairs? That guy. He owned a couple restaurants back then before he decided coffee was his true passion. Hired me as a dishwasher, cash under the table. I wasn't digging it.
I paid some rent to my relative, saved some, and then I had a budget to drink away. I'll admit I'm not proud of my drinking habits, then or now. I was worse then, for sure. Got myself into fights, though I was careful to hit different bars so I didn't become notorious. One time I bit off a little more than I could chew, and this guy Paul Rogen comes to my rescue. He got the whiff of ex-military off me, I guess, and figured I'd be a kindred spirit. So he fought off the thugs and we high-tailed it out of that dive. Skipped over to the bus terminal bathrooms and got cleaned up. As it happened, he was an ex-Marine, or as "ex" as they ever get. He wanted to do something with his skills. I could relate to that. I told him to hit me up if he ever got a lead.
A few months later, he did. I didn't ask Paul where he got his connections. All he told me was that a friend of a friend got him in touch with a guy named Ignacio Quispe. Quispe came from a well-off family that owned a few mines near Huamachuco. Quispe and his family lived outside Trujillo. Bottom line, he wanted bodyguards for his family. If such individuals were suited for, let's say, discreet operations, so much the better. Our crew was rounded by Sag. Paul vouched for him but didn't know him directly.
Mr. Quispe paid pretty well. I certainly expected him to, given the colonial-style mansion he lived in with his family. But given the fact that he needed some hired guns, things weren't all roses. Forgive me if I mess up some of the complexities, but it worked like this: Quispe's miners were unionized. He didn't much care for that, but he didn't have a choice. He was squeezed on both sides. First, there were American companies making inroads, luring people away with the promise of greenbacks, which were more valuable and more stable than neuvos soles. The American companies didn't exactly treat them better, but when people can see the writing on the wall, they'll make a choice. On the other you had the Shining Path. They weren't quite the threat they'd once been, as I understood it, but they hated capitalists, Americans, and unions pretty much equally. Their plan, to the extent they had one, was to make it so difficult to run the mines that Quispe would give up. Either he'd sell to the Americans, whom the Shining Path believed could be easily driven off, or the mines would be abandoned altogether and free for the Comunista to take over and profit from it themselves.
The workers I talked to, they didn't especially care who they worked for, as long as their checks cleared, so to speak.
You're really dating yourself with that.
Well, what should I say instead? "As long as they got their Venmos?" It was 1988.
Stick with the other one.
Anyway, Mr. Quispe thought a show of force, and in particular some foreigners brandishing rifles, would put a little fear into the Shining Path guys and they'd back off. I think he also believed it would help tamp down union agitation. It's not like he threatened to shoot them or asked us to threaten them, but imagine some guys in fatigues show up to your workplace, carrying rifles around, saying nothing at all, just looking around at everything kind of menacingly. You get the message.
So you intimidated union workers? Classy.
It was a paying job. It's not like I'm without scruples. I wasn't there to terrorize people. Mr. Quispe had a nice family and we were all nothing but respectful to them. Even Sag behaved himself, to the extent he could.
Things were calm for the first few weeks. You love that kind of job. It was not meant to last. One of the miners caught a newer employee drawing maps of the mines while on the job. He was secretive about it, too. They suspected he was Shining Path so they roughed him up and summoned the foreman. The foreman knew it wasn't his job to deal with this shit, so he and his guys took him to one of the storage buildings outside and strapped him to a chair, then brought us in. The rest wasn't their problem.
This guy, Capac, insisted he was loyal to the union. He refused to talk and Sag pistol whipped him.
I'm starting to regret asking you about this.
Well, I have to finish, now!
We weren't trying to kill him and I held Sag off from beating him up any more. Frankly, the miners did more of a number on him than we did. Since he wouldn't tell us anything, Mr. Quispe came in person. He took Sag's pistol and shot the guy between the eyes. Didn't think he had it in him, to be honest. He didn't have a "shoot people in the face" look about him. Shows what I get for judging someone by their looks, eh?
Sag, Paul, and I were left to dump Capac's body in the river. I don't know if he was Shining Path or not. Never proved it either way.
None of us had much to say on the Jeep ride back to Quispe's manor. The boss was now suspicious of the mine foreman, too, and wanted to rotate him out and replace him with Mr. Quispe's eldest son, Huayna. The three of us would take different shifts protecting Huayna, Mr. Quispe, and the rest of his family. The idea was that one of us would always be near the foreman, another would be at the house, and the third would go out with whoever left the house. If multiple members of the family wanted to go do different things? Too bad. It wasn't safe.
You might think the next part of this story is something horrible, but it was actually the opposite. I met a woman. Stop snickering.
Her name was Martie Etrheim. She was as smart as she was hot, which is really saying something. She saw through my tough guy bullshit and knew I was a stranger who needed to be shown around. I had neglected to ask Mr. Quispe what his policy was on guests, so Martie let me come back to her place. It was a cute, tiny apartment.
This story is starting to gross me out, dude.
Oh, you thought I was going to tell you positions and how many times she got off or something?
DUDE!!
Look, we fucked, it happened. It was fine. Better than fine. I get it, you don't want all the gory details from an old fart. I'm just saying, we had a great time. And against my usual standard procedure, I "caught feelings," as the kids say.
It turned out that night wasn't just any night for her. It was her last one in Trujillo before heading out to Morococha for six months. See, she was a doctor with MSF, so she went to a lot of different places. Mostly doing physicals and giving shots for kids in places too poor to get it done any other way. I don't want to get too deep into the politics of it, just that she was there to help people and that's what she did.
Like a coward, I didn't see her off or anything. I just went back to work. Now comes the part where everything is fucked up. A couple nights later, Paul didn't come back from his shift looking after Huayna. Sag, Quispe, and I piled into a Jeep and zipped over there. Our first relief was that there was no sign of blood and no bodies. People had either deserted or gotten taken hostage, but they were possibly alive. We searched the place and Quispe found a note saying Paul and Huayna had been taken captive and everyone else was sent home.
I analyzed the note with my cybernetic eye and figured out some of the flecks of dirt on the note weren't from this region, but from northwest of Cuzco. I didn't say anything at the time, because how was I going to explain how I knew something like that? Mr. Quispe felt powerless and decided he would go home and wait for the actual ransom demand to arrive.
While everyone else slept, I went back to the mine looking for more clues. Nothing. I realized I had to come clean, or at least make up a convincing lie, about the dirt. I just said I had a friend analyze it, which is maybe only 30% a lie.
I think that's 100% a lie.
Don't tell me how to do math. So, we needed to get to Cuzco and the thought was that we'd pick up the trail there. A hotbed of Shining Path activity in the area would have to be known to somebody. Mr. Quispe was the type of guy whose name opened doors. He chartered a small jet, only to find it was also booked by a football team. We figured we could share.
If you think "that's suspicious," good job! They were not, in fact, a football team. They were all strapped, members of the Shining Path, and had figured out we were on the way to Cuzco to ferret them out, so they preempted us.
The three of us were also armed and so we had a little shootout on the plane. This was a colossally bad idea, but the jet didn't come with parachutes so what choice did we have? Sag and I managed to take the rest out, but we let Mr. Quispe think a few were his handiwork. Unfortunately, they killed the pilot and co-pilot was pretty banged up. I had Sag rouse him while I went about finding all the holes we'd created and stuffed them with wads of closing so we'd keep at least some pressure. Not a perfect solution at all, but enough to survive the situation.
We were on final approach to Cuzco and I guess there'd been some miscommunication. Sag thought I'd checked all the bodies and I thought he had. Mr. Quispe was too busy throwing up to have been any help. It turned out one of the Shining Path goons had survived and he rushed the cockpit, scuffled with us, and had the plane lurching hard to one side as we approached the runway. So, yeah, we crashed.
Mr. Quispe didn't make it. Sag and I came out alive. How, I don't know. To be fair, he had a nasty leg wound that we patched up but it really screwed his mobility. He was able to accompany me, just slowly. No way he'd be any use in combat like that.
And so then we went up to Machu Picchu where they were hiding out, had a big fight, I got Paul and Huayna back, Sag covered our escape and we all got out. The end.
You're fucking kidding me. That's not the end, is it??
I'm saying it is.
I am absolutely going to bother you about this again.
Uh huh.