Season of the Machete
Page 12
Suddenly a rifle shot crashed through the top right corner of the bus windshield. The entire half of the windshield fell back inside the bus.
Franklin James put his foot to the ground, and the Grasshopper bucked and jumped forward.
The hollow popping sound of M-16 rifles erupted everywhere.
Not thirty yards away from Dred’s men, the tall, gawky bus seemed to strike a giant pothole. The bus slid quietly to the center of the road. It seemed to ride on its right tires for a while. Then it swerved sharply to the left.
Franklin James was already dead, bumping back and forth over the steering wheel. People inside the bus were falling out of their seats.
Like an enormous lawn mower, the double-decker ran over five- and six-foot-high ferns, thick brush, small trees. It hit a huge royal palm straight on, and the palm tree tore back through the engine and cab. The tree trunk continued five feet down the aisle, crushing people in the front seats, and then the Grasshopper finally came to a stop.
Gaping holes began to mottle the side of the bus that faced into the firing squad.
On the second level of the bus, the Tanner security guards answered the rifle fire with a few pistol shots. When the guards were lucky they managed to hit somewhere in the trees, where Dred’s men I were systematically destroying the bus. Shooting it to bits.
The heads of dead passengers sat still in several of the open windows. The broken engine had begun to spew thick black smoke. A few of the bus passengers climbed out far-side windows, tried to run, and were shot down. A small blond boy in red shorts lay dead in the grass to one side of the bus. An older man lay beside a big, black front tire. A twelve-year-old girl ran like the horses on her father’s farm—a beautiful little girl from Surrey, England—and she was a survivor.
For ten minutes there were shouts and stomach-freezing screams from the forty-odd people trapped in the bus. Then there was no sound except for the lazy popping of M-16 rifles.
Colonel Dred and his marksman, Robert, walked to the bus in smoky, devastating silence. As they got up close, parrots and jacamars began to scream in the trees again. The tiny marksman took out a dull black Liberator pistol.
The two disappeared into the bus, and more gunshots were fired. A man screamed inside the bus. Another muffled gunshot sounded inside.
When they came out again, Dred waved to the four boys standing up on the Goat Highway. Each of the four had a long, scary fright wig. Each held a shiny field machete with a red neckerchief tied around the hilt.
At the same time, the other rebel soldiers were getting up out of the brush; dropping down from the trees. The guerrillas began to light up ganja sticks, regular cigarettes, cheap cigars. Only a few of them came forward to examine the bus.
It was Dred himself who saw the beige-and-green shadow moving through the thick backwoods behind the red bus. He recognized the face of Damian Rose, a pink smudge among the trees and bright green bushes: A shiny white smile.
“Aaagghh, Rose. Jeezus, mahn!” The young guerrilla screamed as he realized what was going to happen. He tried to turn away.
The first rifle shot pierced the back of his head; it came out where the black man’s nose and mouth had been. The wound was very hot, and for a split second Dred’s eyes and nose seemed to be on fire. The ground rushed up at his face, and then it all disappeared on him.
He was falling down a pitch-black hole that echoed his screams—R …o …s …e …
By 6:00 P.M. that night, the president of the United States knew about it.
Five members of the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism—the chief of staff, the assistant to the president for national security affairs; the press secretary for the president; the secretary of defense; and the director of the CIA—sat with him in the Oval Office of the White House.
The director of the CIA briefed the chief executive on selected facts about Lathrop Wells, Nevada; the Forlenzas; Isadore Goldman; Damian and Carrie Rose; San Dominica. His primary recommendation at the moment was that the contract operators Damian and Carrie Rose be eliminated immediately. Searched out and destroyed.
“You’re shitting me,” the president of the United States said after he’d heard the entire story. He looked around his Oval Office. At the chief of staff. At his press secretary. At his assistant for national security. “Somebody tell me this man is shitting me. That’s an order.”
From 6:30 in the evening on, the world’s TV and radio stations interrupted their regular programming to announce that the leftist San Dominican rebel, Colonel Dassie Dred, had been killed during an attack on a tourist bus some twenty-five miles east of the capital city of Coastown.
At 8:00 P.M. Carrie arrived in Washington, D.C.
Now the tricky stuff began.
PART II
The Perfect Escape
May 8, 1979, Tuesday
Bay of Pigs II
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Damian and I had violent arguments about the Escape. My point of view: get out of the Caribbean immediately. Damian’s: finish the operation as it should be finished. Take care of Campbell and Harold Hill right. Stop them from coming after us…. That was how Macdonald became important. Also how Damian got the idea for what happened in Washington.
The Rose Diary
May 8, 1979; Fairfax Station, Virginia
Tuesday Morning. The Eighth Day of the Season.
The morning after the massacre at Elizabeth’s Fancy, Mark Hill took a fast shower, combed his thick blond hair, then put on a freshly washed Washington Redskins sweatshirt and neat bell-bottom jeans.
The handsome teenager looked in the mirror over his bureau and gave himself an “okay” sign and a broad, comical wink.
Downstairs, he could hear his mother busily making breakfast. Fried-bacon smells were drifting upstairs. Bacon, and also fresh coffee, which Mark hated with a sincere passion.
The fourteen-year-old quickly brushed his teeth and used the family Water Pik. Then he took the front stairs in three broad jumps. He strode casually into the kitchen, unconsciously imitating a pro football quarterback named Bill Kilmer.
Bright sunshine streamed through the open back door and the saffron-curtained window over the sink. A man and a woman in white terrorist masks stood in front of the sink, on either side of his mother. Each of the two held a long-barreled black revolver.
“You just listen to what these people say.” Carole Hill spoke in a calm voice that made the boy wonder how his mother had gotten so brave so quickly.
Carrie Rose watched the boy through narrow eye slits in her mask. “That’s right, Mark. We’re not here to hurt either of you. Sit down there at the| table. Your mother will make you some breakfast.”
Never once taking his eyes off the intruders, the teenager slowly sat down.
Carole Hill walked over to her stove slowly and cautiously. Her hands trembled as she started to turn her bacon with a table fork. Little spits of grease flew up at her apron and face. “My husband will be home soon,” she said matter-of-factly. “He just—”
Carrie smiled under her mask.’ ‘Carole Ann, your husband isn’t even in the country right now. Relax. Cook us all a nice breakfast, okay? We’re going to be spending the day together, it looks like.”
The man with her, a New York gunman by the name of Kruger, sat down across from Mark at the breakfast table. “Pay it no mind,” the man said. “Doesn’t concern you, Mark.”
“How do you know my name?” was the boy’s first question.
“Oh, we’re friends of your father’s.” Carrie smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY
One girl’s candid evaluation of the CIA’s Caribbean Account in 75…. Basic ineptitude down to a formal science. An inordinate paranoia about Fidel Castro, and/or Moscow. Paranoia about potential trouble in Puerto Rico. Paranoia over Cuban troops in Africa. A gross overestimation of Dassie Dred. A correct evaluation of Joseph Walthey as a potential strongman pig and ally…. Mostly bad information of all things. Bad Intelligence….
Coastown, San Dominica
That same morning in Coastown, forty-four-year-old Harold Hill yawned so that his jaw cracked.
He stretched his thin arms and made eating noises with his lips, teeth, sticky furred tongue. He took off his horn-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.
Harold Hill then rearranged himself on a sighing wing chair inside the U.S. embassy.
He glanced through an army report on Peter Macdonald: “Peter Stillwell Macdonald. Born Grand Rapids, Michigan; 1950. Son of a U.S. Army colonel and a high school mathematics teacher. Youngest of six sons. U.S.M.A. 1969-71. Honorable Discharge. Above-average intelligence. Inferiority complex caused in part by older brothers’ successes…. Mixes well but prefers to stay alone…. No close friends…. Subject of homosexual probe (’73—all branches): negative…. Strong combat skills but ambivalent attitude about current war. A model top sergeant….”
Tossing aside that report, Hill looked back at a yellow legal pad where he’d been free-associating about the Roses. He looked at a black folder marked “Secret—Sensitive.” Then back at the legal pad. It was 5:00 A.M., and Hill hadn’t slept since six the previous morning.
At the top of the yellow, blue-lined sheet,’ ‘Carrie & Damian Rose” was centered and underlined in red. The rest of the paper was covered with neat black handwriting in orderly columns. Ideas, phrases, names, reminders … fourteen items.
1. Tall. Blond. English-looking. Has shopped at Harrods.
2. St. Louis Hotel in Paris … Nickie Handy shot by woman in nearby bistro. Carrie? … Handy used by Campbell (1972). Coincidence?
3. Carrie: fair-haired; supposed to be a stunner; tall … beware! Don’t be a chauvinist, shithead! Carrie is as dangerous as Damian.
4. Husband and wife squabbles … absolutely…. So What?
5. Dr. Meral Johnson. Street-smart. Useful? How best?
6. Peter Macdonald should be found today. Cajoled. Useful!!!!
7. Marines from South America. Colonel Fescoe. Hindrance!!
8. Prop planes going out at night. Marijuana to New Orleans. Shoot down? Shoot down.
9. Coast Guard can blockade island effectively…. Search private craft especially…. Would Goldman help Roses escape? Think so….
10. Can’t let Joseph Walthey go crazy executing Dred’s people. This is important.*****
11. Why Damian Rose phone calls to Campbell? Important!
12. Clue in their organized disorganization also. Important! … Stu Leedman coming from L.A…. Czech: killing team on Rose’s level on loan from Interpol. Hindrance!!
13. Lucky 13! Damian probably a psycho.
14. Pattern suggests bigger plays to come. Antipattern suggests no further plays…. Operative word is “play.” Have to learn to “play,” or lose this one in grand style.********
Harold Hill got up and paced around the large oak-and-brass embassy office. VIP office: like presidential suite at famous hotels. Private bath, breakfast nook. The nuts!
There was no way the Roses were going to get off San Dominica, he considered.
No, there was a way, plenty of ways—but Hill was trying to convince himself that Damian Rose had programmed himself to make a mistake before he took one of them…. The telephone calls to Brooks Campbell. Those were the key. Crank calls!
Harold Hill didn’t have very much to go on— but he did have something: Damian Rose was a tall, blond, English-looking megalomaniac. With luck he could be had.
Hill finally put his cream suit jacket over his arm and walked out of the big, cool embassy mansion. He believed that he’d made a beginning, at least. A good night’s work.
A big red sun was just coming over the green hills that rose high over the perfect little city and the sea. It was a loud sun that would eventually give Hill a headache that day.
Two badly trained soldiers stood out by the front gates, laughing and poking at each other. They reminded Hill how little the people of these countries ever got involved in the realities of their situation.
As he passed by the soldiers, Hill tipped his Panama hat and smiled. As he did so, he automatically thought of the famous poster mocking Richard Nixon. Why is this man smiling? the poster read. Why indeed?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
If everything went as Damian expected it to, we were to meet at the Hilton Hotel in Morocco on or around May 12. If not, not.
The Rose Diary
Cap Foyle, San Dominica
At a quarter past five on May 8, an old James Taylor song was blasting in Peter’s head—“Sweet Baby James.” He was also being mesmerized by the sight of twenty black soldiers guarding the remains of the bus from Elizabeth’s Fancy.
The young American watched the quiet, terrible scene for ten or fifteen minutes, planted it forever in his war atrocities file, then left to forage around for something to eat.
For some disconnected reason, he had the Super Six on his mind: Neddy, Huey, Deli Bob, Bernie, Tailspin Tommy. And little Pete—Little Mac. As he rode away from the ambushed bus, Peter couldn’t help thinking that in his humble opinion, he was way, Way out of his league right now. Even in Special Forces they didn’t prepare you for this kind of miserable shit.
At about that same time, Damian Rose pinched a blue mite off the sleeve of a pale sand overshirt.
At’5:30 A.M. he stood tall and wide awake inside a phone booth in the neolithic farming village of Cap Foyle. Rose asked for number twenty-six and waited for his connection.
Two sleepy Cap Foyle residents, an old man and a girl, were already pushing skeletal bicycles along the town’s dusty streets. Two cross streets down from them was the sharp green Caribbean.
“Hello … I say hello—”
Damian cut off Brooks Campbell by shouting at the sleepy-sounding man—screaming at the top of his lungs into the telephone. “you only have eight hours, asshole! Eight hours to decide to stop chasing us. To live up to your side of the contract…. If you’re looking for us by midnight tonight, I guarantee both you and Hill will be sorrier than you can dream. I guarantee it! You have until midnight to be intelligent for once in your pitiful little grease-stain lives.”
Damian then hung up the phone. The tall blond man walked back to his car, humming a favorite tune—“Lili Marlene.” He was beginning to enjoy his escape plan.
Meanwhile, twelve rather striking-looking men were making their separate ways to San Dominica. They were coming from Miami and New York. From Acapulco, Caracas, San Juan. Each of the twelve was an expensive male model. From the Ford Agency. From Wilhelmina Men. From Stewart and Zoli.
They’d all been hired by Carrie the week before. To pose for brochures for the new Le Pirat Hotel and for the Dragon Reef Condominium Homes. They’d been specially selected off composite and head sheets at rates of $500 plus expenses per day..
The peculiar thing was that all twelve men were between six feet two and six feet four.
All were strikingly blond.
All looked terribly, terribly English.
Part two of the curious adventure had begun. The perfect escape.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Casinos are now being built by all the big motels. The island will have one bad season. Maybe two. Maybe even three. But then it will boom like nothing even they can imagine. The island has four times the area of Nassau and New Providence. It’s twice as beautiful as Jamaica. It should become Monte-Carlo West.
The Rose Diary
These days it is fashionable to be against the Americans. It is my hope to be in the vanguard of a countermovement, which, I suspect, could be equally fashionable one day. That is—to be for the Americans.
Joseph Walthey
Coastown san Dominica
Tuesday Afternoon.
While all this was going on, Brooks Campbell sat hunched over a steaming pot of very strong, very good Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. During the morning and early afternoon of May 8, the young CIA man made person-to-person, heart-to-heart tel
ephone calls to some of the best homicide men in the world.
In the big office next door, Harold Hill was doing much the same thing on a slightly larger scale.
Calls went out to Mr. Alexander Somerset, the commissioner of crime at Scotland Yard; to Edward Mahoney in the Office of Domestic Intelligence in Washington; to the Assassination Bureau in Paris. Calls went to the biggest crime men in West Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada….
The subject was top priority and very confidential, the conversations made clear:
“A very large, very private manhunt is now being conducted throughout the Caribbean and South America. The objects of the hunt are two slithery white soldiers of fortune who have taught a ragtag band of guerrillas how to fight and think like Mau-Maus, the PLO, and the Japanese army. Who have, among other things, massacred forty-nine civilians on board a bus. The names are Damian and Carrie Rose.”
The slip-catch was that the United States was handling the search like a top-secret, national security matter. The clear implication: Somebody had goofed again in the Caribbean.
The exact nature of the mistake remained a secret. A top secret.
Before it was over, though, some wisenheimer at Interpol had nicknamed the operation Bay of Pigs II. By Sunday that slogan was a headline in London’s Observer.
Beginning unofficially at 6:00 P.M. on May 8, officially at 9:00 A.M. on the ninth, a straight-faced, very serious attempt was made to take the eighty-one-by-thirty-nine-mile island of San Dominica, turn it upside down, and shake, shake, shake it like a child’s piggy bank.
The long-shot hope was that both Roses and Peter Macdonald would tumble out into the waiting arms of Brooks Campbell and Harold Hill.
Beginning at nine, government sound trucks began to rumble through major cities and the surrounding countryside. These trucks broadcast the politest lilting-voiced descriptions of a tall, blond, English-looking man; of a young American man, Peter Macdonald.
Meanwhile CCF soldiers and U.S. Marines from Georgia and Florida searched the beaches, the grasslands, even the island’s large, steamy rain forest: West Hills. An exhaustive house-by-house, hotel-by-hotel search was begun in the cities of Coastown, Port Gerry, and Cape John.