by Lou Cameron
Nobody got to say much until all the seated officers had scraped out of their chairs to attention. Then Torrez smiled and said, “Please make yourselves comfortable, Caballeros. This is not an official visit. I just heard about the attempt on yet another general’s life and hurried over for to discuss the matter in private with him.”
Captain Gringo nodded, turned to the other military, and called out, “Dismissed. But don’t forget the inspection in less than an hour now!”
As his officers began to leave the war room, Captain Gringo led Torrez and his bunch into the office next door. Gaston didn’t follow. He tagged after the officer who knew where his guns were, asking more questions. He didn’t care what Torrez had to say.
Captain Gringo didn’t, either, but being polite to politicos came with the job. There weren’t enough seats in the smaller office to go around. So he sat Torrez behind the desk and remained on his polite feet. Torrez asked, “Do you still mean to hold a full inspection, in spite of all the recent excitement, General? I should think you would wish for to take time off for to gather your wits again!”
Captain Gringo said, “It didn’t take me two minutes to figure out those last two time bombs were meant for me, sir. I’d already ordered a general inspection for four-thirty, and it might be nice to get this army running on time for a change, no offense.”
“You certainly do take charge of things, as they told us you tended to. But can’t you postpone things just this once? My wife and the other ladies were looking forward to meeting you and the preparations at the palace have all been made, you see.”
Captain Gringo nodded curtly and replied, “My troops have already cleaned their rifles and shined their boots, if they know what’s good for them. I’m sorry if the ice is melting at the other affair, sir. But unless you want to make it a direct order, my job here comes first!”
A politico behind him muttered he was pretty fresh. President Torrez asked him soberly, “And what if I gave you a direct order to attend the social function across town instead, General?”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “I’d obey it, of course. You outrank me, El Presidente, so I’d have no choice.”
Then, as he saw Torrez leaning back with a more relaxed expression he added, “Once I met the ladies and swallowed all the punch I’d been ordered to, I’d of course come back here, leave this pretty uniform neatly folded on that desk between us, and write a very polite letter of resignation.”
Another civilian big shot hissed, “You speak like that to El Presidente? You dare, you Yanqui vagabundo?”
Torrez was a smarter as well as bigger big shot. So he just stared curiously at the tall American as Captain Gringo shrugged and replied, “When you’re right you’re right. I’m a wandering soldier of fortune without a country. But when I hire out to soldier I do it right or I don’t do it at all. If you people want a general who looks reassuring at social gatherings I suggest you promote Major Parez. He looks like a man who enjoys good food and liquor. If you want a general to lead your forces against those guerrillas I suggest, with all due respect, you get out of my hair and let me get cracking. I can’t think of a nicer way to put it, señores. So I have to say the army you hired me to lead is in piss-poor shape to fight anyone. I mean to start whipping it into shape at four-thirty. It’s your move, President Torrez.”
Torrez nodded soberly and said, “Vamanos, amigos. Can you not see our general is busy?”
The general inspection went well enough. It usually did when troops had had the fear of God instilled in them well before the old man came down the ranks with a brace of high brass and a sergeant major, carrying a gig sheet and murderously sharp pencil to check off open flies or rusty rifle bores. Captain Gringo had already noticed the Segovian troopers were unusually well dressed and equipped for this part of the world. Their uniforms were not too wilted and their rifles were spanking new Krag .30-30s, bolt action and sword bayonetted. He grabbed a few rifles to see how many bees were nesting in the barrels and, when he found the bores clean, said so with a smile as he returned them to their worried owners. He paused at a bright-looking mestizo private to ask, “What is your seventh general order, soldado?”
The kid stared bewildered, licked his lips, and asked, “General what, my general?”
“You don’t know your twelve general orders, muchacho?”
“I am sorry. I make no excuse. Even my father says I am stupid, my general.”
The sergeant major bored in, pencil poised, to demand the now very frightened trooper’s name and number. But Captain Gringo stopped him and said, “Momento. I’ve another question first. Tell me, muchacho, has anyone in this man’s army ever given you the twelve general orders every soldado is required to learn by heart?”
The private gulped and said, “They only gave me these boots this afternoon, when they said there was to be an inspection, my general.”
Captain Gringo’s face hardened as the private wondered what they could bust him to that was any lower. Then he nodded and said, “Your seventh general order is that you talk to no one while on guard unless it’s in connection with your duty. I’ll have the other eleven posted on the bulletin board before sundown, and you’d better know all twelve the next time I see you. Is that understood?”
“Si, pero may I ask where this bulletin board my general speaks of may be found?”
Captain Gringo turned to the sergeant major, who looked sheepish and explained, “We have no bulletin board, my general.”
“Why not? How in the devil are these men supposed to know the orders of the day if nobody posts them in front of the orderly room?”
“In God’s name, I do not know, my general. Most of them do not know how for to read or write. So we have never felt the need for written instructions.”
Captain Gringo growled, “You need ’em now. I expect to see a bulletin board in place by sundown, too. Don’t paint it. I’ll be posting orders on it through the night as they’re typed up, see?”
The sergeant major glanced up at the already pretty low sun as he replied, “I shall get to it first thing in the morning, my general.”
Captain Gringo’s voice whip-cracked loud enough for wiser heads all around to hear as he snapped, “I didn’t say I wanted a bulletin board in the morning, Corporal. I said I wanted it by sundown! Would you like to try for Private First Class?”
The erstwhile sergeant major gulped and replied, “I assure you it will not take us that long, my general.”
“Very well, Sergeant. I’ve seen enough. So move it. I’ll dismiss the men myself after I’ve had a word with them.”
The sergeant major took himself and his clipboard out of there before they could get in more trouble as Captain Gringo strode out to the center of the parade, turned, and, speaking as close to West Point as Spanish allowed, announced, “Nobody will be punished this time because you’re all so sloppy I wouldn’t know where to begin. Starting now, you’re all confined to the post until further notice. Not because you’re bad soldados but because you’re not soldados at all, and I can’t lead you out into the field until you at least know which end of your rifle the bullet comes out of. Meanwhile, El Viejo Cabrón is still out there, stealing women and fucking chickens, so we don’t have much time to get this outfit in shape.”
He waited to let them enjoy the chuckle about the old goat who fucked chickens before he continued, “I’m not going to ask the last time any officer read you your A.R.s and General Orders. You’re going to have them read to you a lot within the next twenty-four hours and you’d better get ’em right! Military Law says a soldado can’t be punished for ignoring an order or regulation he’s never received, which is lucky for you slobs right now! Make sure you know them all by the time we take the field because anyone who fucks up on me out there will find himself dead after a very short drumhead court martial. Pay attention to the bulletin board once it’s up. Orders posted are posted to be obeyed. No excuses will be accepted. Are there any questions before you’re dismissed
for now?”
A man in the front ranks wailed, “Si, my general. What if a man can’t read your no doubt very fine orders?”
“That’s not a question. That’s a baby crying for its mother’s tit! Let me ask you a sensible question, soldado. How do you get ready for inspection when you have no boot shine and you’re out of cleaning oil for your rusty weapon?”
“I guess I ask my companeros for to help me out, my general.”
“I guess you do. You see, you’re not really a cry baby. You’re just not used to thinking for yourself, muchacho. It’s my job to give you orders. It’s your job to carry them out. You don’t ask me why I give you orders you may not understand and I don’t ask you how you mean to obey them, as long as you do. Any other dumb questions? Bueno. Tropas! Atención ... Despedirad!”
He turned on one heel and marched away as they fell out, still somewhat confused by the way things seemed to be running around here now. Gaston met him near the foot of the stairs leading up to the second-story corner quarters and observed with a chuckle, “I always knew you would be a shitter of chickens if ever you made a few stripes, Dick. Mais to get back to more mundane matters, let me show you what some thick-headed abuser of authority has stored right under our new quarters, hein?”
Captain Gringo followed the shorter Frenchman around the stairs and through a low-cut doorway in the thick stucco wall beyond as he resisted the temptation to tell Gaston he’d noticed how an ex-Legionnaire whipped troops into shape with awful remarks about their sex lives, their mothers, or both. It was dark inside. Gaston said, “Don’t you dare strike a match. There is an Edison switch somewhere on this wall, if I can find the little sucker of camel cocks.”
He did and switched on the overhead lights. Captain Gringo whistled as he stared past him, down into what had to be the old powder magazine of the original Spanish Colonial installation. It was just as obvious some alterations to the layout had been made upstairs. No professional Spanish officer would have ever had his war room, office, and sleeping quarters over a slumbering pit of high explosives!
As they moved down the interior steps of stone, Captain Gringo saw the old magazine held case after case of .30-30 ammo, which was bad enough. The thrilling part was the corner piled ceiling high with four-pound artillery shells and, better yet, some barrels of loose black powder stacked neatly atop cases of sixty percent DuPont dynamite!
Gaston said, “I asked. Nobody around here knows what on earth the last general wanted with the blasting merde. Did you notice how well guarded that door above us was, Dick?”
“Guarded? Shit, it wasn’t even locked! I guess we know now where the guys who blew up that tailor shop and taxi could have found the wherewithal to do so! ”
“Oui, the unfortunate driver told us, just before he flew over the roof tops, that he’d been set up by men in military uniform. I have already given orders to shift the furniture a bit upstairs. But merde alors, if we were anywhere inside this adorable little fortress when this merde went poof—”
“That’s another answer,” Captain Gringo cut in, adding. “They lured that other C.O. well away from here to blow him up. They just tried to blow us up blocks away from here, too.”
“Eh bien, it seems obvious some species of cochon does not wish his own furniture disarranged. If it had been playmates from another neighborhood, they would not have had to go to so much trouble, non?”
“Right. They could have blown the last C.O. out of bed upstairs just by being careless with matches down here. Assuming they had a better reason to blow him out of a whore’s bed, they still had it set up here to disturb our sleep tonight if they wanted to, so, okay, the motherfuckers, plural, have to be stationed here with us!”
It took more than seventy-two hours and even then it wasn’t easy on Captain Gringo or his half-ass command. Some of the pissed-off officers resigned their commissions. Officers were allowed to do that. The enlisted men just had to tough it out as the two soldiers of fortune worked their tails off. But as time and sweat passed, some of the brighter ones began to notice the vast improvements and so, while sore of limb and frustrated of cock, the Segovian Army’s morale began to improve as Captain Gringo turned it into a fighting force instead of a pull-toy for young hidalgos too dumb to run plantations and too horny to enter the priesthood.
He’d have gotten rid of more of the original officers if he could have. But despite his no-nonsense attitude Captain Gringo knew there was a limit to how stiffly one could resist political considerations. The so-called republic was run by a junta of guys who were used to having their asses kissed and, while Captain Gringo wasn’t good at kissing ass, he knew better than to fire a big shot’s kid brother just because he was stupid. So as he reshuffled the deck he “promoted” some of the dumber officers with good connections to jobs that even a moron couldn’t screw up. Who cared if an in-law promoted to, say, a warehouse commander or mess officer was promoted to full pay grade? Given gold brick jobs, they tended to gold brick a lot and stay out of his hair.
That left a lot of slots to be filled by new officers, of course, and here again an outside professional had to bend with the wind a bit. As Gaston pointed out before El Presidente could, it wasn’t such a hot idea to promote people in a Latin American army on merit alone. Aside from pissing off the intermarried ruling class, there was the greater danger of over ambition. Once a peon who’d considered himself lucky to be accepted as a grandly uninformed private discovered a semiliterate with a good parade-ground voice could get promoted, for God’s sake, it was hard to keep him from dreaming dangerous dreams about running the whole show. So Captain Gringo kept social background as well as brains in mind as he began the first 201 File the Segovian Army had ever had. How they’d been paying the troops regularly or even keeping track of the desertion rate was up for grabs before he started to keep personnel records and showed the paymaster how to prepare a regular paybook.
Once he had some facts and figures on paper he could see the so-called army added up to less than a brigade. That meant his rank of brigadier wasn’t justified, but he saw no reason to draw that to the attention of the easygoing government. Gaston didn’t want to be less than a colonel, either, even though the field artillery of the whole army added up to less than a full battalion after Gaston had formed it into two field batteries and an H.Q. & Service Battery. When one of his new battery commanders asked how come, Gaston spat and said, “Merde alors, field artillery is kept ready to take the field as called for. Not to rust scattered across the field where an enemy can capture a gun here and a gun there as he may choose!”
Captain Gringo gave similar orders regarding the useless outposts, once he’d established that the guerrillas had never been seen anywhere near a bunch of well-armed men in uniform. As he read the old reports and drew red X marks across his situation map, the emerging pattern showed the other side tended to avoid any target that looked as if it might be well guarded. They’d never hit the railroad or the lead mine. They’d never raided a major settlement or even an important plantation. So what was all the fuss about?
Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “You’d think an outlaw with a gang half the size of El Cabrón’s would have the balls to hit range riders, even if they had to come out in the open on the savannah to do it. But the only reports we have along those lines involve occasional long-range sniping from tree clumps, and naturally no vaquero who knows his range is about to ride close enough to trees he doesn’t know pretty well. So, so far, knock wood, not one armed vaquero has been hit!”
“Perhaps our alarming Old Man of the Mountain has the streak of yellow down his fat back?”
“I don’t know yet. But that’s the way I mean to play it. Let me show you an idea I just had.”
He moved over to the desk he’d had wedged into a corner of his newer but hopefully safer war room and opened a drawer. As he spread some glossy photo prints atop the desk he explained. “Poor little Phyl took these, up the coast. She took some other dirty pictures I
see no reason to have developed. But these might come in handy.”
Gaston grinned as he studied the pornography their steam launch companion had considered anthropology. He said, “Mon Dieu, I could make a fortune selling these to tourists in Paris! Mais I fail to see any military value to these pictures of très disgusting Indians.”
Captain Gringo added the file photo of El Viejo del Montaña to the pile and singled out one distinctly dirty picture Phyl had taken as he said, “This fat old chief was probably just showing off his power when he made that younger Indian bend over.”
Gaston grimaced and said, “Oui, the handsome youth appears to be in considerable discomfort with the bully’s fat dong up his derrière. But what of it? She took this picture of primitive love up in British Honduras, non?”
“Sure, but an Indian is an Indian and, better yet, nobody down here could possibly recognize that cornholing victim or the background.” He placed the locally taken glossy of the guerrilla leader next to it and added, “Notice how the heads of the older guys in both shots are about the same size. That show-off sodomist up the coast was built a lot like our pal, El Cabrón, or at least he was built the way I’d picture this other fat slob with his duds off. What if we pasted the guerrilla leaders’ head over the head of that Honduran chief and—”
“Avec that big straw sombrero?” Gaston cut in with an incredulous laugh, adding, “You would have to, you know, and the results would be très ridiculous!”
Captain Gringo chuckled and said, “Yeah. That’s the whole idea. We’ve already got a lot of people calling him El Viejo Cabrón and God knows what macho Catholics would call a dirty old man who seems to be shoving it brown to some teen-aged captive who doesn’t like it, wearing his hat, yet! I’m going to have a bunch of fake poses run up and distributed. The distribution is the easy part. Guys are always passing dirty pictures around and nobody ever asks where they came from. Finding a photo lab to do the hard work and keep quiet about it may be more of a problem.”