Chapter 22

With time on my hands before this afternoon’s classes on using the new grav sled, I found Commander Ferguson and spoke with him. Twenty minutes later the guards at the hastily thrown together prisoner compound let me enter. “I’d like to speak with everyone if you would gather them together,” I told the closest of the rebel leaders, glad that I was fluent in Spanish.

“Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“Because I believe many of you have legitimate complaints about things that happened before the war and that those complaints still need to be addressed,” I replied.

I could tell that he was appraising me. I was young, unarmed, and alone in the compound. “You are either very brave or very foolish,” he said quietly.

“You’re probably right, but I’d still like to speak with everyone,” I repeated.

It took half an hour for him to get everyone together. While they gathered, four troopers set up a vid screen for me, just outside of the fence. I stood just inside the fence in a large grassy area that sloped up and away from me so everyone would be able to see.

“Some of you may recognize me from the raids on the underground towns,” I began.

“Are you really Lucky Jim?” one of the men near the back asked.

“I am, and I’m surprised that you’ve already heard about that,” I replied.

“We have a vid unit that always shows news. We saw the broadcast with your President, and when they showed some of the things you’ve done,” someone else responded.

“That makes things easier. I wasn’t aware that you had a vid unit, so I brought one to show you that presentation,” I said as I motioned to the unit behind me.

“Now that you know who I am, I want to tell you that I am aware that many of you joined the rebel cause because you felt powerless against the rich and powerful who used their wealth and power to dominate others, especially the poorest people in the country.

“I won’t promise that I can stop the abuse, but I intend to do what I can to end it and see that those who deserve it are arrested and tried in a court they can’t influence. It is my intention to do what I can to see that laws are changed to severely punish anyone who still tries to use their money or influence to gain an unfair advantage.

“Right now, I don’t have any organization to help me with it, but I will hire the people necessary as soon as possible. The Lucky Jim Trust is contacting people they feel are qualified to help with the effort. That’s a good thing because, honestly, I have no idea how to do it.

“In addition, I purchased the mountainous area where the tunnel complexes are. Those mountains still have many large deposits of minerals. I intend to open mines to provide jobs for people who need them. The jobs will pay a fair wage to everyone who works for me and the mines will be as safe as we can make them. The man I hired to oversee the operation of the mines was a mine inspector here who angered many wealthy businessmen when he closed their mines until the owners made them safer.

“I intend to operate the mines in a way that they have the least possible impact on the environment. The areas we don’t use for mining will again become a preserve for native animals and plants. We will do some logging, but only to thin out trees where they are the densest. We will replant many areas that have already been clear-cut. We will work with the small villages in the area, showing them how to farm more efficiently and how to improve the soil so they don’t have to use the slash and burn method.

“I also purchased some of the eastern coastal plain where I intend to grow much of the food for our workers so they have plenty to eat. Like the last Lucky Jim, my goal is to provide much-needed jobs, and to make sure the people who work for me have a safe place to work, a good home, plenty of food, and a fair wage.”

Picking up a clipboard, I explained, “If any of you want to talk to me, to tell me about situations you want me to investigate, please sign up. I don’t know how long it will take me to speak with everyone, but I will do my best. I have a commitment to help our military end the other conflicts and I have commitments involving starting a giant farm near my home, as well as the mines and farm in Nicaragua, but I will do my best to speak with everyone. I’d like to start with any of the leaders who might want to talk to me. After that, I’ll talk to people in whatever order they have signed up.” I handed the clipboard and a pen to the closest person.

“Thank you for listening to me and I hope I am able to reduce or end political corruption and the abuse of power in Nicaragua and elsewhere,” I told them.

Idania was right. By the time I finished my speech, I only felt danger from about a quarter of the 238 prisoners. I managed to talk to three of the rebel leaders before lunch. The first was Leoncio.

Leoncio’s story

The rebels felt safe hiding in the underground tunnels he had discovered, tunnels rumored to have originally been made centuries ago by the Mayangna people, the original inhabitants of the area since 2,000 BC. Beyond a few elders who vaguely remembered wild rumors of hidden tunnels, the tunnels were so old that the tribes of today didn’t remember anything about them. Those elders who did remember the stories believed that the tunnels had collapsed or been buried centuries ago or were only large caves where the Mayangna people had sheltered.

Leoncio had stumbled onto one of the hidden entrances when he was ten. Vito, the teenage son of the open pit gold mine’s last overseer, saw him exiting the tunnel and demanded to know what he had found. Using one of the grav sleds Vito’s father owned, one of the very first ones available to civilians, the two explored the entire eastern complex of tunnels and discovered the two abandoned underground towns. Vito had told his father that he wanted to explore the mountains looking for another place to mine gold. Glad to have the Vito doing something useful, even if he doubted that his son would find anything, the father had agreed.

Two weeks later, while exploring the larger of the two underground towns, they had found a cache of figurines and statues, as well as bowls and jewelry made from gold, silver, or copper.

Rather than split it, Vito claimed almost everything for himself. Enraged, Leoncio stabbed and killed him with a copper knife, the only thing Vito had been willing to let him have.

Fortunately for Leoncio, nobody knew the two of them had been exploring together, and especially not what they had been exploring. Leoncio dumped Vito’s body from the western exit of the main east-west tunnel, pushing it over the edge of the ledge and into the river gorge where it was never found.

Taking two of the silver figurines, Leoncio used the grav sled to reach the southwest exit. From there, he hiked into the nearby town and sold them. When the man who bought them asked where he had found them, Leoncio lied and told him that his father had found them several years earlier when he was fishing in the Prinzapolka River. He explained that his father had recently passed away and the family needed the money.

Making sure that he wasn’t followed, Leoncio carefully made his way back to the southwest tunnel entrance and then flew through the tunnels to the southeast exit. From there, he walked into town and bought two bags of mortar, carrying them back to the tunnel using a sturdy shoulder pole like the women had used for carrying jugs of water in the underground mining town we captured. He had put each bag into a large, woven basket, one basket tied to each end of the pole. He spent six months using mortar, rocks, and adobe clay to make each of the tunnel entrances smaller and harder to notice.

Leoncio never returned to the southwest town again and always bought the mortar in the south or southeast town. He avoided the easternmost town since his parents traveled to the marketplace there once a month. That was the same town the carts carrying the rebel gold and silver had been headed for when we captured them. Despite being very cautious when he swapped the batteries for the grav sled every other day, he was almost caught twice.

Meanwhile, Vito’s father was frantic with worry about his son and hired native trackers to find him. While not an expert tracker, Leoncio knew enough about tracking by age ten to make sure nobody could track him once he reached the mountain’s rocks. Unfortunately for the trackers, aside from the first time, Leoncio and Vito had always ridden the grav sled, leaving no tracks to follow, and any tracks from their first passage had been obliterated by the rains.

A short time later, Leoncio’s father decided to move from their small village. A man came through offering better paying jobs on a coffee plantation in the western part of the country. The man had assured his father that they even had paying jobs that Leoncio and his two younger sisters could do.

Leoncio had one week before they moved, so he closed off all the entrances except the northeastern one. He used adobe mud and rocks since it would take too long to walk into town and buy enough mortar. When the family left their small village, the eastern entrance had an opening too small to crawl through, but one Leoncio was sure he could find when he was old enough to strike out on his own. He took three gold and three silver statues when they left, wrapping them carefully in the small bundle of clothing he carried. The remainder had been carefully hidden inside the closest underground town.

Shortly after reaching the coffee plantation, he buried the figurines three klicks back down the road from the plantation. Weeks after he turned eighteen, Leoncio left home. Both of his sisters were already married. When he left, Leoncio gave his parents most of the money he’d saved from working. Retrieving the six figurines, he took a bus into Managua and sold them for more money than his entire family could have earned in years working on the coffee plantation.

Leoncio outfitted himself to explore the mountainous region and its tunnels. Now that he was older, he wanted to explore the mountains west of the first tunnel complex that he found. Just inside the exit he’d used to dump the body, he and Vito had found hand-hewn planks with remnants of some sort of rope. Except for the fact that the boards were rotting, there were enough planks to form a bridge across the gorge. The boys assumed that there had once been a rope bridge across the chasm, but they had no way to cross the chasm to look around. They guessed that whoever made the tunnels shot an arrow tied to string across to someone on the other side. They would use the string to pull sturdier cording and finally the rope. How the other person got over there in the first place, they had no idea.

Leoncio took some of the remnants of the rope and two of the wood planks to the university in Managua. When he checked with them several months later, the university informed him that the rope had been made from several types of plant fibers and Llama hair, and then impregnated with animal fat. One of the plants used in the rope had been extinct for nearly a thousand years. The Llama hair had surprised them because the animals had never been indigenous to Nicaragua. The wood was a local species of mahogany. The university dated the wood to 1117 BC by using Carbon-14 dating and analyzing the growth rings.

Armed with modern scanning technology that he could now afford, Leoncio found the eastern entrance of the east-west tunnel in the central tunnel complex. Within three years, he’d located and thoroughly explored all three tunnel complexes. He had been disappointed that only the eastern complex had underground towns, and more disappointed that there had been no more caches of treasure. After removing the remainder of the original cache and storing it in safety deposit boxes at two different banks, Leoncio headed west to Managua to tell the university about the tunnel complexes.

He stopped to visit his family on the way, only to discover that his younger sister had been executed. She had stabbed and killed the son of the plantation owner when he raped her. The plantation owner had used his political influence and money to have her charged with his son’s murder. The trial was swift and the verdict a foregone conclusion. She was executed three days later.

Enraged, Leoncio left and sold another statue. With the money, he purchased two pistols and a car worthy of a wealthy man. He returned to the plantation, pretending to be interested in becoming a partner and expanding the plantation, something he knew the owner had wanted to do for more than a decade.

Having spent three years in the mountains, Leoncio had grown a full beard. With a neatly trimmed beard and a new, stylish haircut, the plantation owner didn’t recognize Leoncio and invited him into the house. At dinner that night, Leoncio shot and killed the owner’s other son at the dinner table, and then the owner.

Having heard how the owner and his sons had abused the young women that were forced to work as servants in the house, and how the workers on the plantation felt about the way the entire family treated the workers’ daughters, he gagged and bound the owner’s wife and two daughters. He gave them to the eight young women working in the house, asking to have the three women taken to the workers’ village for the men and boys of the village to enjoy.

He spent a week searching the house, taking valuables and filling his car. He forced the wife to divulge bank account numbers and passwords. He went online and emptied all the accounts into his own account. Before leaving, he drew money from the local bank and left the cash equivalent of ten years’ wages for every family to make up in some small way for the abuse they had suffered.

He flew to the Caymans and opened two new accounts, depositing the bulk of the money he had taken from the plantation owner. With that done, he flew back to Managua and drove to the city near the coffee plantation. A month later, he began his revenge against the rest of the people responsible for railroading his sister. Her attorney and the prosecuting attorney were the first two to die. The judge and the chief of police, along with a dozen police officers who had been involved watched as their families were murdered before they, too were killed.

Leoncio became a crusader, searching for situations where wealthy and powerful men abused their influence. It didn’t take long for those wealthy and influential people to notice, especially when several of his targets were prominent politicians. All the police had to go on were artist’s sketches and several short security video clips. The video clips didn’t help because Leoncio wore a different disguise each time, even dressing as a woman occasionally.

He finally talked to a newspaper reporter and explained what he was doing, but never mentioned the coffee plantation. The reporter nicknamed him El Verdugo, the executioner. He was still actively hunting corrupt politicians and government officials when the revolt began. He actively sought out the rebels and joined, buying, and donating more than five hundred automatic rifles and two hundred cases of ammunition. After fighting with them for a year, he showed them the underground tunnel systems. He then used the remaining money from his offshore account to purchase weapons, body armor, and grav sleds.

One of the rebels was a miner and realized that the odd tunnel in what became the rebel capital was an underground mine. The ore produced mostly gold, but also some silver. Figuring that it was poetic justice, the rebels kidnapped teenage children of politicians and wealthy business owners who abused their influence and wealth. They forced the sons to work in the mine and the daughters to their beds.

The other two men told similar stories of unpunished abuses they or their family, or even close friends had suffered. I was surprised to learn that the rebels had an excellent school for the kids, even if it was more focused on propagandizing their “cause,” stressing fairness and financial equality for all.

When I finished interviewing them, I got the three together and discussed their idea of utopia. While I definitely believed in the first part, fairness, I was dead set against the second part. Having researched the subject for a sociology paper for one of my classes, I had discovered the perils of “financial equality.” On the surface, it sounds like a wonderful, idealistic idea.

IF, HOWEVER:

· You suddenly freeze up once you’re on stage in front of 500 people;

· You don’t know the difference between the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, and a hundred others;

· You don’t understand calculus or physics well enough to solve a simple equation;

· You haven’t a clue about what new item to create to make the world a better place or wouldn’t know how to create the item you thought up;

· You can’t draw, paint, sculpt, sing, write, or act to save your life;

· Your sense of direction leaves you lost playing pin the tail on the donkey WITHOUT a blindfold;