Felix sweated. He was smeared with camo grease and weighted down by Dolby's Jungle Stereo System and his end of the 60mm mortar and expecting any second to hear the telltale click of a bouncing Betty mine before it made a stranger of everything from his waist down. Twice things had moved underneath his feet. They'd been walking since before midnight. He was profoundly grateful for the presence of Mac, on the other side of the mortar. Somewhere on the far edge of the compound, Rostow and Bundy were moving, alone, to their own positions, Bundy with his sniper rifle.
"There," said Mac, pointing at an area as black, to Felix, as the rest of it. But sure enough, as he focused, he saw the pinprick of electric light through the chiaroscuro of underbrush. "Let's not get too close," said Mac. "I don't want to get my dick blown off. Get that CD player ready. I'll get this set."
Felix said, "Listen-"
"That's them. Hey, sounds all right."
Charley's voice came on. "Dragonfly to Grasshoppers. Slow Boy is heading your way. Let's give him a big Texas welcome."
Mac offered Felix a mortar round. "You want to kiss it?"
"Why would I want to kiss it?"
"For luck."
"No."
Mac kissed it and held it ready. They heard the Thunderbolt whining by above them. Felix switched on the CD player; Dolby's subwoofers started to rumble out a low-frequency sound track of jets taking off the deck of a carrier.
Charley's voice said, "Fire one." Mac dropped the mortar into the tube. It arced over the trees and into the compound. They heard the explosion a few seconds later.
"Good shot," said Charley, watching. It had missed the chemical shed-the objective-by several hundred yards, but it hit another building Charley thought was a barracks but couldn't tell, the light was too dim. "Put the next about three hundred yards east."
"Roger."
Hot Stick had taken Slow Boy off computer and was making slow, come-get-me passes over the compound. Felix and Rostow's subwoofers were booming out their sound tracks (of planes taking off carrier decks) on either side of the compound. Mac's second mortar landed in the middle of the large grass field in front of the white house that Sanchez had told them was his residence. Charley was puzzled by the absence of people below. Where the hell was everyone?
"A little more to the east, about fifty yards."
"Dragonfly," said Rostow. "I got someone with what looks like a hand-held-yeah, it is, it is. It's the Stinger."
"Bring Slow Boy down there, low, real low," Charley said.
"Watch this," said Hot Stick, twiddling his joysticks. The Thunderbolt went into a slow, tight circle over the field; it seemed to hover.
"Good," said Charley.
"He's getting ready to fire," said Rostow.
"Bundy," said Charley, "can you see him?"
"Negative," said Bundy, peering through the scope of his Winchester.300 magnum. "I'm watching the house."
"All right, stay on the house, stay with the house." He had to be in the house, where the hell else would he be? He'd come running out of the house right into Bundy's crosshairs and-then they could all go home.
"He's fired, he's fired!" Rostow shouted.
They saw it launch, saw the orange trail roaring up at Slow Boy.
"What are you doing?" Charley shouted at Hot Stick when he saw Slow Boy break out of its tight circle and head off over the jungle.
"Giving him a run for his money," said Hot Stick.
"It's my money. Just let it… What are you doing?"
Slow Boy took off, Stinger in tow. It was an interesting sight, a grown missile chasing a little bitty airplane.
"Look here, Hot Stick, just let the damn missile connect with the plane."
"This is great!" Hot Stick said. "This is fantastic!"
"Never mind."
"Vehicles approaching," said Rostow. "Six, seven of them on the river road."
"Hot Stick!"
"Watch." Hot Stick turned Slow Boy around toward where the vehicles were pouring into the compound.
He didn't know what to make of it. It looked like a plane, and there was something following it. Jesus Christ! "Off the road!" he shouted at Virgilio.
"Tora! Tora! Tora!" shouted Hot Stick, putting Slow Boy into a dive.
Slow Boy and the Stinger punched into the ground fifty yards in front of him. The explosion blew Sancho's Toyota high into the air. The next thing he knew, his windshield had blown out and he and Virgilio were suddenly in the back seat.
"Nice going, son."
"Dragonfly, he's getting ready to fire another one. You better move away."
"Bundy, what's the situation with the house?"
"Nothing. No one's home. It's like Son Tay."
"Mac, Felix, start dropping mortar where the river road comes in. There's vehicles."
"Dragonfly, he's fired another missile. Get out of here, Dragonfly."
"Hold on," said Charley. He pushed forward on his stick, dropping the Hughes so hard the shoulder straps dug into their collarbones. Hot Stick's controls flew up out of his hands and banged into the overhead bulkhead, then came down and bounced off his flight helmet.
Charley pulled back on the stick a little late. The chopper hit the ground hard and bounced back up into the air, vibrating like a washing machine on spin cycle. The Stinger shot by the small clearing overhead.
The lower limb of the sun was now over the eastern horizon. The Stinger, seeking heat, turned toward it and set out dutifully to annihilate it, crashing to earth, some miles later, like Icarus, dismally short of its objective.
"You all right?" said Charley, regaining control of the Hughes and bringing it up out of the clearing.
"Shit," said Hot Stick.
"What is it?"
"The computer cable. They're off computer."
"Well, get back on manual."
"I can't fly three at once on manual."
"Never mind the F-18s, then. Concentrate on Fat Albert. We're going for the house."
"My transmitters-"
"Dragonfly, where do you want the next mortar?"
"Dragonfly, what is your situation? Over."
"We're going for the house. Bundy, what do you see?"
"Still nothing."
"Rostow, what about the cars?"
"Looks like two down. There's men all over, twenty or thirty of them."
"All right, stand by, I'm coming up. What about the Stinger man?"
"I'm looking for him. I'm in range now, I'm close enough for a shot if he-there he is, I see him."
"Well, shoot him."
"Fuck, he ducked behind a building."
"Stay on him. I'm coming up, we got a problem with the planes. They're flying on their own."
"Jesus-"
"You boys clear the area around the white house, repeat, clear the area."
"Roger, Dragonfly."
"Bundy, how far are you from the house?"
"About two hundred meters."
"Okay, stay low, you understand? Hot Stick, you got Fat Albert?"
"I can't find him, he's, he's-I don't know where he is."
"Where's the other two?"
"I don't know where they are. Brazil, they're in fucking Brazil!"
"Well, let's get them back to Peru. We ain't finished here."
He pulled himself out of the Toyota and ran to where the Stinger made a crater of Sancho and Luti and-it looked like-half a dozen others. He counted three fires around the compound, one in the barracks, an area near-Christ, the chemical shed. He directed Virgilio to take some men and start hosing down the area by the chemicals. He shouted at Mirko to locate Beni and tell him to stop firing Stingers at the billonario drogues. He turned toward the house, distant across the field, and saw the girl standing on the porch.
"I got it I got it I got," said Hot Stick. "I got Fat Albert."
"Good. We're going in."
"I can't find the others-"
"Never mind the others. Commence arming sequence."
"Primary safeties, off. Secondary safeties,
off. She's hot."
"Turning final. Rostow, you let me know you see that guy with the missiles."
"Roger, Dragonfly."
Fat Albert whooshed by them leaving a smoky contrail.
"We're going in. Five hundred meters, four hundred meters-"
"Dragonfly," said Bundy. "There's a girl on the porch."
"What?"
"Repeat, a girl."
"Three hundred meters-"
"Abort."
"What?"
"Abort!"
"But-"
"ABORT!"
He saw the flash. It took a half second for the sound to reach him. He covered his eyes instinctively, and when he looked back he saw it, a perfect, insolent parody of a mushroom cloud, rising leisurely into the morning sky.
35
"Bundy, acknowledge, acknowledge."
"What the hell happened up there?"
"Bundy, this is Dragonfly, acknowledge. Hot Stick!"
"You said abort."
"Not into Bundy!"
"I wasn't aiming for him."
"Shut up. Don't say a word. Bundy, speak to me."
"Must have been an aileron."
"Felix, Mac, Rostow, can you see Bundy anywhere? I'm going in to take a look." Charley hovered over the smoking hole in the jungle behind the white house and craned his head out the window. The force of the blast had knocked over trees in a concentric pattern. Everything was on fire. Charley hovered as low as he could, flames licking up at the Hughes. It was dead in there. An armadillo couldn't have survived.
"Aren't we kind of low?" said Hot Stick.
Charley pulled his.45 out of its holster and pointed it at Hot Stick.
"What are you doing?"
"Take it!" Charley shouted at him. Hot Stick took the gun, looking confused. "Now shoot yourself!"
"What?"
"For incompetence!" He brought the helicopter up into cooler air. Below he saw the compound. Men running, vehicles, smoke, confusion. He saw a girl running across the wide field in front of the white house. She was without clothes. He heard a sound beneath his feet, like pebbles kicked up by a car's wheels.
"They're shooting at us, Mr. Becker."
"All right, everyone listen up. Get back to the ship. Get the anchor up and get going. I'll join up with you."
"What are you doing?" said Felix.
"We're going to stay here awhile, look for Bundy."
"We are?"
Charley flew a wide circle along the rim of the compound.
"They're shooting at us, Mr. Becker."
"'Course they're shooting at us!"
Charley flew off into the jungle. A quarter mile from the compound, he brought the Hughes into a stationary hover. He reached down and picked up a small Orvis bag off the floor and unzipped it, took out a grenade and handed it to Hot Stick.
"You know how to use these?"
"Uh-"
"You pull the pin, open the window and drop it out. Can you handle that?"
"What are we doing?"
"We're going flying." Charley took out a grenade with his left hand, put the pull pin in his teeth and gave a yank, chipping a crown. He put the chopper's nose down and gathered speed.
"Niño! The helicopter!"
He'd grabbed an AK from the weapons shed and was standing in the middle of the field with Soledad, who was evincing strange calm, under the circumstances, watching with childlike serenity the events around her as if they were taking place in another world. She said to him, "I love you."
The helicopter broke over the edge of the trees. He aimed the AK and fired off a burst, swinging the barrel with the deftness of a practiced trap and skeet shooter.
The helicopter disappeared over the far side of the compound. As it did he heard two explosions. The Range Rover lay on its side. Just bought it, too.
Charley eased back on the stick and brought the chopper to another stationary hover over the jungle.
"You all right?" he said.
"No!"
"Good. Here. I'm gonna take her in a little lower this time."
Charley tugged on another pin and eased forward on the stick. Treetops skimmed by underneath.
He slapped in another banana clip and planted his feet and covered the tree line with the barrel of the AK, just as his father had taught him to do when shooting from the number eight position at a low bird.
The chopper came out of the woods. He swung the barrel as he fired. Then saw the tiny specks tumbling out. He stopped firing and threw himself to the ground. The explosions were close this time. When he lifted his head, it was to see the girl's leg in front of him, she peering down at him with that remote stare of curiosity. "I love you."
The inside of the chopper filled with smoke; alarms buzzed on the instrument panel.
"What does that mean?" Hot Stick coughed.
"Means we're on fire."
"Jesus, we're on fire! We're on fire!"
"Here." He tossed Hot Stick another grenade. Charley pulled the pin, pushed down on the stick and began his last charge. For if he like a madman lived / At least he like a wise one died. More the reverse in his case, but the line came to him all the same.
He didn't lead it as much this time. He saw an arm reaching out of the starboard window and emptied his clip at it, saw sparks, smoke. He lowered the rifle and in the next instant heard the explosion and looked in the direction of the chemical shed in time to see five thousand gallons of ether and acetone igniting.
Charley felt something sharp in the vicinity of his right leg. The chopper kept wanting to turn in circles and he had to work the controls hard. He'd lost half his RPMs in his tail rotor, the oil pressure was down to nothing, loud knocking sounds were coming from the undercarriage and when he looked down to see what it was he noticed his pants leg was torn and wet.
"You okay?" he shouted over at Hot Stick. He couldn't see with all the smoke. He pulled the emergency-door release and instantly the air cleared inside. Hot Stick was slumped forward over his controls, held by his harness, hands limp by his sides. The left side of his helmet was holed where the bullet had exited.
He had almost no control by the time he saw the ship. He set down so hard on the deck that it bounced and the tail spun around and chopped up the antennae and part of the smokestack. Charley was knocked out from the impact. He dreamed it very clearly: saw the chopper drop into the water and sink bathyspherically, bub-bub-bubbling down into the silty murk of the Huallaga; then there were dolphins, pink dolphins like the kind you'd expect to meet only in a hangover, making faces at him through the Plexiglas bubble. He heard Felix's voice saying, "Boss, boss," but what was Felix doing, swimming with pink dolphins?
36
The fire burned into the afternoon. The heat was so intense the men kept dropping from exhaustion and dehydration. It began to spread toward the number four pozo, where an acre of coca leaves lay macerating in kerosene and sulfuric acid. If that caught, the Andes themselves would go up in smoke. He ran to the shed and started up the bulldozer and drove it out, stripping gears as he went and plowed a shallow trench between the advancing flames and the edge of the combustible pit. The handles were hot by the time the firebreak was complete.
He walked back to the field in front of the house. His beautiful field, which he used for croquet. Scarred, scorched. Soledad was crouched over something in the distance. She was wearing only white panties that emphasized the lack of any other article. He'd told her not to go naked in front of the men. It was not an easy concept to explain to Soledad, especially with his limited command of her language, until one day Eladio had told him of a saying among the men of the tribe: "Your eyes have gone bad from staring at the privates of too many women." He'd put it to her that way: don't ruin the eyes of my men, please, I depend on their eyes. He'd given her a brassiere, a very sexy one with lace; she fashioned it into a slingshot. For a moment he forgot about the fire and watched her. His eyes wandered across the field and fastened on something that resisted recognition. He approac
hed and stared at it.
The markings on the fuselage said NAVY. It had gone in straight, skewering his croquet field with its Pitot tube. He stared.
"Samin," he shouted. "Give me your rifle." He raised Samin's AK and fired a burst into the repellent object, which obliged by exploding into small pieces that scattered themselves, like flaming leaves, over the already harrowed field. The girl, hunched over whatever it was, raised her head only briefly.
The needlelike Pitot tube was still stuck in the grass; the rest had blown up. He stormed over and gave the needle a good kick. It tumbled like a thrown knife and landed some feet away.
"Toy planes," he shouted. "He comes for me with toy planes!"
"Soledad!" he shouted. The girl made no answer. "What are you doing?"
Virgilio came running to say that they'd found Beni-or what was left of him. Virgilio thought he'd been shot before the fire did the rest.
"Good," said El Niño. "It saves me from having to shoot him myself."
Virgilio looked at Samin, Samin at Virgilio. Each decided it would be best to be somewhere else, and ran off, declaring a remembered emergency.
El Niño walked to where the girl was. "What are you-"
It was a howler monkey that had been blasted out of the trees by the force of the explosion when the chemical shed ignited. The monkeys had lost their fear of man over the years and clambered in the trees close to the compound to scavenge. Its fur was smoking.
She smiled at him and handed him a piece of torn-off flesh. Such bounty. Food from the sky-already cooked!
He wheeled away and staggered off. He took deep breaths, telling himself that his reaction was irrational, that she was Indian, to her it was just-food; then he leaned over and threw up.
37
Charley came to propped up on a pillow on the settee underneath the Gainsborough.
The pain was in his head, in the center of his forehead. He reached up and felt something sharp protruding. Felix was sitting beside him.
"What is this?" Charley said, fingering the object.
"It's a piece of glass. I'm going to get it out."
Charley tugged. His fingers were wet with blood; they kept slipping. Charley watched the blood course in rivulets down onto his chest and onto the Naugahyde settee. Margaret had chosen the neutral gray color because Tasha was always spilling things. He felt the blood puddle under his elbows. He blinked. A silvery jet of liquid flew through the air over his head. Felix had a hypodermic.
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