by Nick Carter
“That dirty son of a bitch,” she said. “That bastard! He’ll pay for this. Oh, he’ll pay!”
The helicopter left the jeep and tilted away, beating for altitude. I snuggled deeper into the thick brush and watched Lyda.
“Which son of a bitch? Papa Doc or P.P.?”
“Both!”
She handed me the glasses and rolled over on her back, sighing a deep breath that pushed her soft breasts up beneath the green jacket. She closed her eyes.
“Both,” she repeated. “When the time is right. Soon, I hope.”
The whipping crack of the gun came up the slope to us. I put the glasses on the column and saw a man in the ditch beside the road. His bare black feet were threshing about and as I got the picture in sharp focus the goon standing over him leveled his revolver and emptied it. So slowly and deliberately that I could count each shot. The black feet stopped moving.
Lyda didn’t move. “Those Tonton Macoute don’t fool around,” I said.
Her eyelids crinkled. “Murderers and perverts, all of them. Their time will come.”
I chewed on a flat disc of cassava bread. It tasted sour and moldy, and I hoped they had washed all the hydrocyanic out, but it was better than ancient C ration. Duppy and his party hadn’t brought along much food. Just the cassava bread and some cooked goat meat and a couple of bottles of Barbancourt rum. I couldn’t fault the rum. Barbancourt is the best in the world.
The girl puffed her lips out and said, “Give me a cigarette, darling. My Christ, what a march! I thought I was going to die a dozen times.”
“Not now. Turn over, slowly, and hide your face. The helicopter is coming this way.”
I glanced at Duppy, who was sleeping near us. He was lying on his stomach with his face cushioned on his arms and his ragged bush hat tilted to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was all right.
The helicopter clattered over us, very low from the sound, and we lay unmoving with our faces pushed into the rank grass. From a corner of one eye I watched it go swooping away to the east, toward Sans Souci and P.P. Trevelyn’s estates.
Lyda sat up cautiously. You think they spotted us?”
“No.” I gave her a hard grin. “Not a chance. We would know if they had. They must have machine guns aboard that egg beater.”
She held out a slim brown hand. “Cigarette me, then. 11 suppose it is safe to smoke?”
I lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. “As long as you don’t stand up and blow smoke rings.”
I glanced at Duppy again, wondering if the helicopter had awakened him. He didn’t move. His matte black face looked younger in repose, though I figured him to be in his early forties. One thing—he didn’t look any smaller when he was asleep. I made him about 6-5 and at least 260 pounds. He was wearing faded khaki shorts and a dirty torn tee shirt that was too small for his barrel chest. Weather, I knew, would never bother this man. On his huge feet were a pair of old Army boondockers with no socks. Around his thick waist was an ammo belt and he wore a Colt .45 like the one I carried. One of his outflung hands, looking as big as a tennis racket, rested on a clip type Thompson gun. Nearby was a musette bag full of spare clips and a big hunk of cassava bread.
I relaxed and stretched out beside the girl. It was going to be a long day.
“Whisper,” I said. “How did you square it? No invasion?” It was the first opportunity I had had to speak to her alone.
She was on her belly, smoking slowly and brushing at the smoke as she exhaled.
“No real problem. Yet. I told Duppy that I had changed my mind—that I didn’t want to risk the invasion until after we had Valdez. That I was afraid that they would kill Valdez the moment the invasion started, because they know we want to make him President, and I couldn’t risk that. I think he believed me.”
Her whisper was sibilant, caught up in Ssss, yet no louder than an insect chirping near me.
“You might be right at that,” I said. “The thought had occurred to me. If they can’t keep Valdez, they’re not going to let anybody else have him—alive.”
It was AXE policy exactly, Hawk’s theme, but with a reverse twist.
She crushed out her cigarette and curled into the womboid position she favored. “I’m going to sleep now, Nick. I’m dead. Don’t get into anything with Duppy—and wake me if anything happens.”
A minute later she was asleep, breathing softly with now and then a tiny snore. I turned on my back and looked at the pellucid blue sky. I took a drink of warm, tinny-tasting water from my canteen. I had been pretty well bushed when we reached the ledge, but now I was neither sleepy nor tired. After a few minutes I took the binoculars and crawled to the east as far as the brush offered protection.
Bishop’s Cap and the Citadel was off to my left now. The mountain fell away to a valley, where I could see a few thatched huts, and then there was another green clad mountain. At the foot of this mountain the fence began. I trained the binoculars and focused them and after a time I could pick up one corner of the fence glinting silver in the sunlight. I was impressed. The fence was ten feet high and topped with rolls of barbed wire. Closely knit steel mesh set into a concrete foundation. I had to chuckle sourly. When you are a billionaire you can afford to do things properly.
Both Lyda and Duppy said the fence enclosed some five thousand acres. There was one gate. Just one, and it was heavily guarded around the clock.
Inside the fence, not far from the crumbling and tropic ruined palace of Sans Souci—which Henri Christophe had cooled by diverting a stream to run under the floors—there was another modern palace built by P.P. Trevelyn. The bastard has his own little kingdom! His own army and his own air force. And he had Dr. Romera Valdez.
As I watched the corner of the glinting fence a guard passed leading a police dog on a leash. The guard had a belt holster and a rifle slung over his shoulder and wore a black peaked cap and a black uniform and high black shiny boots. I doubted that his cap insigne was a skull and bones—the distance was too great to make it out—but that black uniform reminded me of one word.
Gestapo! I already had an antipathy for Mr. P.P. Trevelyn and now I found myself actively disliking him. I am a professional and I seldom hate, but I knew it wasn’t going to bother me much if I had to kill Trevelyn.
Duppy settled down beside me, and I knew the blacks had named him right. He did move like a ghost. Nobody ever comes up behind me that way—but he had. This huge man called Duppy who was really Diaz Ortega of KGB.
There was a rank sweaty smell about him. He stared at me with muddy brown eyes, the whites tinged a faint saffron and streaked with red veins. After a moment he gave me a white gap-toothed grin.
“What you think, blanc? We gonna make it in there and get Valdez out?”
I shrugged and fell into the character of Sam Fletcher. “Why not? It don’t look so tough from here. The fence might be a little trouble, but we can whip that.”
Duppy gave me a cast iron stare. “Yeah, blanc. And the guards and the dogs and the zombies.”
I had been going to say something, but I forgot what, it was and my mouth hung open. Then I managed to say, “Zombies?”
He grinned enormously. “Yeah, blanc. Zombies. Old P.P. got ‘em, man. He works them hard, ever sort of work, and he their master and they do anything P.P. say do. You don’t believe in zombies, blanc?”
If he wanted to play games it was all right with me. I grinned back and said, “No, Duppy. I don’t believe in zombies. What’s the gimmick?”
He took his eyes off me at last and fumbled in his pocket for a crumpled pack of Splendids, the local cigarette. The harsh fumes reminded me of Chinese cigarettes. Duppy blew smoke through his wide nostrils and reached for the binoculars.
“I ain’t say I believe in zombies, blanc. I ain’t say I don’t believe in zombies, either. All I say is that P.P. got zombies working for him. Mean bastards, too.”
That was all he would say about the zombies. For a long time he was silent, carefully studying the terr
ain to the east . with the glasses. At last, without taking the glasses from his eyes, he began to talk again.
“Come dark, blanc, we three go down to that valley yonder and find a houmfort in the jungle. Ain’t no real building, nothing but a clearing, but it a voodoo church just the same. One that Papa Doc and P.P. don’t know about, i Then maybe you see something else you don’t understand.”
“We got no time for that voodoo junk,” I said. “If we’re going to do this we have to do it fast. Real fast. Luck doesn’t last forever.”
He adjusted the focusing dial on the binoculars. “Where you meet Swan, blanc?”
“New York.” No lie.
“How much she paying you?”
“A thousand a month. A bonus if I get Valdez out alive.” Not bad for off the top of my head thinking.
He peered intently through the glasses. “Hmmm—a thousand bucks a month. Maybe I making a mistake, blanc. Maybe I oughta go mercenary, too, you think?”
“That’s your business,” I said curtly. “I fight for money. I give honest measure.”
“I ain’t quarrelling, blanc. Ain’t quarrelling at all. But fair is fair—you getting all that money you should take the most risks, do the dangerous jobs, eh?”
I agreed to that. I was curious to see where all this was leading.
“You never been in Haiti before, blanc?”
I had, several years before, but I couldn’t admit it. I said no.
Duppy put down the binoculars and leveled his red veined eyes at me. “So you don’t know nothing about Haiti, blanc. Me, I been here a long time. Swan, she born here. So we do the planning, blanc, and you be the stud, huh? You the professional fighting man, me and Swan the thinkers, eh? That the way we do it, blanc.”
He was trying to provoke me for some reason of his own.
I didn’t think he had really bought the Sam Fletcher story, but even so he couldn’t know who I was. Unless Lyda told him. I didn’t think she had, or would. I doubted that she knew who Duppy really was.
I also doubted that Duppy knew that I had spotted him. If he had, or if he knew that I was AXE, he would have moved in on me before now. Forced a showdown. He hadn’t, so I figured that I still retained a small edge. This being so, I didn’t want to force matters either. Not yet. I smoked and played at being relaxed and confident and studied his shoulders and biceps and torso and knew that if I had to go against him in a fair fight it was going to be one hell of a brawl. I knew a lot of tricks, and with this oversize character I would need every one of them.
When Duppy spoke again there was a faint sneer in his voice. He knew I wasn’t going to call him and so he put me down as chicken. I liked that. It gave me a little more advantage when the showdown came.
“So we do it like I say, and like Swan say, blanc. Tonight we go to the valley, into the jungle, and pick up the other blanc. Man name of Hank Willard. I guess Swan tell you all about him? She say how the houngan and the mambo been hiding this white man for a long time now? How he want out bad, and he willing to help us? She say all that to you?”
“She told me.” After we were ashore and half way up the mountain she had told me.
Duppy gave me another blunt stare. “This other blanc, this Hank Willard, he a mercenary like you. Good thing you help save him—all you money blancs should stick together.”
He crawled away and I watched him munch on some cassava bread and then go back to sleep. He didn’t look at me, or speak, again.
Lyda was still sleeping. I wanted to sleep, but couldn’t, so I went back to using the binoculars again.
The village still smouldered. Only the little French church remained, its white stones drenched in sunlight. The straggle of refugees had vanished, as had the jeep and the Tonton Macoute. No sign or sound of the helicopter. At the moment the scene was peaceful, serene, a becalmed patina of old France superimposed on dark Africa. Wild coffee and banana trees grew on the lush slopes and valleys, and breadfruit and orchids entwined in clusters. Beyond the valley at the foot of; our mountain the steep rises were heavily forested and jungled and I could see how Hank Willard could have been concealed all these months.
The thing was—AXE had Hank Willard in the files. Freelance flyer, soldier of fortune, part-time drunk and full-time mercenary. In his late thirties and from a small town in Indiana. One of the footloose and fancy free boys that had flown fighters in the Korean war, had been a double ace, and had never been able to fit back into civilian life. Couldn’t take discipline either, so after the war the Air Force had separated him fast. Since then he had knocked around over the world, flying anything that would get off the ground, and working for whoever would pay him. During the last attempted invasion of Haiti, Willard had flown an old B25 and tried to bomb Papa Doc’s palace in Port-au-Prince.
I couldn’t help grinning as I thought of it now. Hank Willard hadn’t been very successful. He dropped two bombs, missed the palace by a half mile, and both bombs had been duds. A few minutes later the B25, a crate held together with spit and scotch tape, had given up the ghost and Willard had to crash land it in the jungle. Nothing had been heard of him since.
Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute rounded up the other invaders and gave them a fast trial and hanged them in various parts of the country as a warning. Their bodies had been gibbetted, enclosed in an iron cage and hung in chains and, or so Lyda told me, were still rotting around the country. Papa Doc had put a ten thousand dollar bounty on Hank Willard.
I puzzled about that as I put down the glasses and rubbed my eyes and admitted that at last I was going to be able to sleep. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of temptation! Yet nobody had sold Willard. Went to show how much they must hate Papa Doc. And P.P.
As I was falling into sleep the drums started to tattoo again. A soft tapping and rumble that I couldn’t locate because of the diffuse mountain acoustics. On and on the drums talked, louder and louder, a sullen and endless percussion that finally lulled me into sleep.
A scream startled me awake. Not a human sound. A long drawn-out screaming of air friction on sleek overheated metal. I rolled over and came to my knees, the .45 in my hand. Lyda and Duppy were awake, crouching and staring around.
Duppy motioned me down. He had his Tom gun ready across his left arm.
The girl, brought out of sleep into sudden terror, stared at me with her mouth open. “What in Christ’s name?”
I breathed again. She had come very damned near to! calling me Nick.
Duppy had the glasses and was peering down the slope! behind us, the slope up which we had toiled the night before,! After a moment he beckoned to us and laughed harshly.
“Nothing to do with us, blanc. Swan. Come take a look! Ain’t nothing but junk.”
We crawled to him and took turns with the binoculars. The spent missile had smashed itself to bits in a clump of hibiscus and the immortelle of poinsettias. The white metal, jagged hard garbage now, lay tossed about in sinister contrast to the peace of slow falling dusk.
I was tense inside. I watched Lyda and Duppy. Especially I watched Duppy.
Lyda could be an actress and a poseur, but I didn’t think she was faking amazement now. She gaped at us, her mouth open, her brown eyes wide with question.
“What in hell was it? Is it? Are they shooting at us?”
I let Duppy pick it up. Watching him.
He gave me a sidelong glance as he patted her shoulder. “Papa Doc, and old P.P. they got missiles, Swan. Shoot ‘em off the Citadel over yonder. The zombies built ‘em ramps. A week now they been shooting, practicing, and I don’t tell you before ‘cause I don’t want worry you none. You got too much worry now, I think.”
Lyda looked at me, then back at Duppy. Her eyes narrowed and I could see her starting to put it all together. She knew, of course, that Dr. Romera Valdez was a physicist But I gave her a clean slate—she hadn’t known about the missiles until this moment.
She said: “That’s why they’re killing people and clearing them off the land. A missil
e range.”
Duppy nodded. “That why, Swan. But nothing to worry us, like I say. Papa Doc and P.P. out of their minds, I think. Missiles ain’t no damned good, no good at all. They go all which way, them missiles, and smash themselves up all the time.”
He pointed to the village, smoking in the approaching twilight. “I think maybe they try hit that with missiles—don’t even come close. No mind to us, Swan. We get Valdez away from them they not even be able gonna shoot the missiles no more.”
Lyda sank to the ground, a stunned look in her eyes “Missiles! Oh, my God, Missiles!”
Duppy wouldn’t look at me. He set about getting his gear together. He had been carrying her pack and musette bag and now he began to shrug into the pack harness.
“Be dark soon,” he said. “Better we get ready to move. They be waiting for us in the forest. After we got a lot of miles to cover so we be in position come morning.”
At last he looked squarely at me. “That right, blanc?”
I smiled falsely and nodded. “That’s right, Duppy.”
I was beginning to get it. To understand at least part of what was going on. It was pretty weird, but that is the name of the game.
The drums, silenced for minutes by the screaming missile, took up their muted throbbing again.
Chapter 9
The one thing I hadn’t counted on was that Hank Willard would know Sam Fletcher by sight. Maybe I should have thought of it, because the soldier of fortune types get together at times in bars and clubs all over the world, but I didn’t.
Willard, a skinny guy wearing ruined officer’s pinks and a tattered but clean OD shirt, was quick enough on the uptake. He didn’t give me away. What he did give me was one look from washed out gray eyes that said it all—I wasn’t Sam Fletcher and he knew it. And he wanted me to know that he knew it. I figured that his shut mouth was going to cost me something and I was right.