The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(22)
The most unforgettable member of the group was Bruce Heinicke, Elkins’s longtime fixer par excellence. I had been curious to meet him for years, after hearing Steve’s vivid descriptions of him and his adventures. I found him under the palapa bar before dinner, a morbidly obese man wearing a Panama hat, unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt displaying gold chains, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. He had a terrific scowl on his face. He told me he had returned from the airport, “where I just handed out a fucking Kansas City roll” to get the expedition’s equipment through Roatán’s customs office—computers, video and film cameras, sound gear, tripods, and all the rest. Even with the blessing of the president, people needed to be taken care of. “They wanted a ‘deposit’ of a hundred eighty thousand dollars,” he said, his jowls trembling at the outrage of it. “Said they would give it back when the equipment left the country. I told them, ‘No, no, that’s not fucking gonna happen.’ But a lot of grease went to a lot of different people.” When I started taking notes, he said, “You can’t print a fucking word I tell you unless I say so specifically.” He had a trove of tales, but at the end of almost every story, he turned his watery eyes on me, jabbed his finger, and said: “You can’t write that down. It’s off the record.”
Finally, in frustration, I asked him: “Isn’t there a way I can tell at least some of these stories?”
“Oh sure,” he said, “absolutely. No problem. After I’m fucking dead!”* He snorted with laughter and almost choked on an eruption of phlegm.
I asked Bruce about his relationship with Steve Elkins and how their partnership worked.
“Lemme tell you a story. I was in a restaurant and some guys were mouthing off. I could see trouble coming. So I put a gun at this guy’s head and said, ‘Get the fuck out of here or you’ll see all your fucking brains all over the fucking wall behind you.’ That’s the way I get things done. You gotta be that way down here. Don’t fuck with that gringo, he will fucking kill you. When you’re dealing with people like that, they got no respect for anybody, human life’s not important, so you have to treat them that way or you will get walked all over. Steve thinks everybody is his friend. He wants to be their friend. And he doesn’t understand that some people, they’re just looking for a chance to rob you and maybe kill you. Steve trusts everybody and down here you just can’t.”
Heinicke had a bum knee from a gunshot wound, which he was happy to explain. Back before he met his wife, he’d dated a Colombian woman and become close to her father, who ran one of the major drug cartels in Colombia. Heinicke did some business for the father, transporting drugs and collecting money. He was caught by the DEA, who demanded he work for them as an undercover informant, to avoid prison. But he said he continued to work for the cartel boss and kept the DEA satisfied by giving up some low-and mid-level people from the cartel. “I was smuggling coke out of fucking Colombia,” making a cocaine delivery from Colombia to Nicaragua for his boss, he said. He went to Cartagena to pick up the “product” in a small duffel bag, to carry to the contact, who was supposed to pay $75,000 for it. He went to a shuttered restaurant, where he was surprised to see not one man, but two. One man had a bag full of money. “I told him to show me the money. He started to walk over and I told him to stop and just open the bag and slide it over,” which he did. As the man stepped back, both men pulled guns and started shooting at Heinicke. “They were only ten feet from me when I pulled my .45 and shot one in the right shoulder, the other in the face, and before the one I shot in the shoulder hit the ground I split his head like a watermelon. The whole gunfight took two to three seconds. I caught a round in the right knee.” He collected all the guns, money, and drugs. He was in terrible pain, so he snorted some lines and packed cocaine powder into the bullet wound, which made him feel better.
“I had seventy-five thousand dollars cash in a fucking backpack, five kilos of cocaine, and two pistols,” he said. “This friend in La Ceiba flew down. I said, ‘Get me out of here, I got a bullet in me.’ Later, X [I have removed here the name of a well-known American writer and ex-soldier] set me up with the US Embassy out of Honduras—they sent me to Nicaragua to take pictures of Sandinista encampments and get GPS locations.”
After dinner, Elkins led the team in a planning meeting. The first item on the agenda was getting our cover story straight for the locals. Only a few people in the Honduran government knew what we were doing. There was to be no loose talk of Ciudad Blanca or the Lost City of the Monkey God. We were, Elkins explained, merely a bunch of nerdy scientists doing an aerial survey of Mosquitia using a new technology, to study the ecology, rainforest, flora, and fauna. The legend had grown to the point where many Hondurans were convinced the White City hid an immense treasure in gold; it would not be safe if our actual activities became known.
Before launching the plane, the lidar team had to find secure locations for three fixed GPS units to be erected on the ground. These units would communicate with the GPS unit in the plane during flight. Each unit had to have a power source and, ideally, an Internet connection to upload the data. Juan Carlos Fernández had worked out the geometry of the system, which was difficult to do since most of the ground area was either impassable or too dangerous. He finally mapped out an almost linear arrangement for placement of the units: one on Roatán Island, the second forty-five airline miles away in Trujillo (the coastal city near where Cortés wrote his letter to Emperor Charles V), and the third in a tiny village called Dulce Nombre de Culmi, at the edge of Mosquitia, a hundred miles distant. The first unit was erected at the end of the beach that formed the artificial lagoon at the Parrot Tree. The second went onto the roof of the Christopher Columbus Hotel in Trujillo.