Deadly Additive

by Donn Taylor

Behind the prisoner, Tomás held up a type of carbine Contreras had not seen before. “He was carrying this weapon, Comandante. The Colombian army has nothing like it. And that is not a Colombian uniform.”

  The prisoner laughed. “We got the new weapons last week. We’re training with them now. In another month you’ll be outgunned.”

  Contreras slapped the prisoner twice more. “What are you doing here, so far away from your unit?”

  The prisoner’s nose now bled as well as his mouth. “I was deserting. I wanted to bring you one of the new weapons and join your cause.”

  Behind the prisoner, Tomás put the carbine back with the prisoner’s other equipment and gestured frantically. “Do not believe him, Comandante. He does not speak like a Colombiano.”

  “You may be right, Tomás.” Contreras drew himself up to his full height. “Place our company across the airstrip on high alert.” He began slapping the prisoner again. “Meanwhile, we will see how this peasant likes our methods of interrogation.”

  Even as he spoke, he heard the sounds of distant automatic weapons fire. Someone was engaging his outguards beyond the western end of the airstrip. Then the sounds of jet aircraft told Contreras he was under serious attack. He stopped slapping the prisoner and left him sprawled, unconscious, in a chair between the two guards. Quickly, Contreras doused the cabin’s lone gasoline lantern and ran outside to appraise the situation. In the eerie half-light of dawn, Tomás was already organizing the available guerrillas to protect the headquarters. But against what? How great was the threat? Contreras could see part of the airfield and a few descending parachutes. Parachutes! That meant the gringos were attacking. He stood appalled. No wonder that accursed prisoner spoke with a strange accent!

  Contreras’s mind raced. He could not defend both the factory and his headquarters with the forces on hand. Losing the factory spelled doom for his coup. That defeat tasted bitter. But the important thing now was to survive so he could lead another coup later on.

  In the increasing daylight he spied paratroopers running toward the factory. Their flank was exposed to the guerrillas positioned around the cabin. Tomás’s fighters opened fire, and three of the intruders fell. The others dropped prone and returned fire with automatic rifles.

  Contreras strode back into the cabin. The prisoner sagged unconscious in the chair. Contreras slapped him twice more for good measure and shouted at the two guards, “Go outside and help your comrades. I can handle this gringo swine.” He slapped the prisoner again. When the man remained unconscious, Contreras seized his own AK-47 and returned to the door. He held the weapon waist high, his finger on the trigger, and looked out to check the situation.

  It did not look good. The first American forces had set up a base of fire, and a second unit followed with a flanking movement. Under their superior firepower, the small guerilla force was pinned in place. With more parachutes drifting down on the airfield, defeat was certain. That meant it was time for Contreras to make his personal withdrawal and fight another day.

  “Comandante.”

  The hoarse voice came from behind him. Terror ran through his veins as he spun and faced the prisoner. The man’s hands held the new kind of carbine he’d carried when he was captured. The butt of the weapon was pressed against his shoulder and the black hole of its muzzle pointed directly at Contreras. Behind the carbine, two hard black eyes stared out from a bruised and bloodied face. “Drop your weapon, Comandante. You are my prisoner now.”

  Contreras’s rage rose in him like a lava in a volcano. Rage at himself for turning his back on a man he thought was unconscious. Rage at the prisoner for outwitting him. Rage at the accursed gringos for spoiling his coup. Ruled by rage, he squeezed the trigger on his rifle as he whipped it up to stitch the prisoner’s chest with automatic fire.

  He did not make it.

  His rifle fire had come nowhere near his target when he saw the prisoner’s weapon leap and recoil against its master’s shoulder. A long full-automatic burst. Contreras felt the bullets tear into his chest and abdomen. He heard the clatter of his own weapon falling to the floor. He saw the prisoner’s eyes burning like pools of black fire.

  Then he saw nothing at all.

  ****

  Sledge jumped from the aircraft and the rushing air ripped at his face and clothing. Then came the jolting deceleration as his chute opened. He seized the risers and looked for a good place to land. The first thing he saw was a firefight in progress across the eastern half of the airstrip. A bolt of fear shot through him before his mind clamped down on it and began the machine-like calculations needed to direct the battle. He shouted a warning to the men above him and guided his chute as far west as he could. That wasn’t much. The jump from only five hundred feet above the ground did not allow major adjustment. Still, he managed to touch down in the westernmost quarter of the strip. By the time he landed he had reckoned the enemy strength to be one company.

  Sledge collapsed his chute, freed himself from its harness, and ran to help others landing nearby. Even before landing, he’d identified the men firing from around the factory as U.S. troops. That meant the enemy had to be on the north side of the strip. But not at its western end, for Sledge had made his own landing unopposed. It was into those unoccupied woods on the north side that he ordered each man as he landed.

  Those were the lucky ones. Eight of Sledge’s twenty men landed in the middle of the crossfire at the eastern end of the strip. Those who were not killed or wounded immediately lay on the bare, flat ground and returned fire until they were silenced. It did not take long.

  That left twelve men for what Sledge had in mind. They were chemical warfare specialists, but all were combat ready. With Major Hanlon’s help, Sledge organized them into two fire teams and located one radio for the group. Sledge took that for himself.

  “There’s an estimated enemy company at the far end of these woods,” he told the men. “They’re heavily engaged with our troops on the other side of the strip. If we hit their flank, they can’t bring many weapons to bear on us without hitting their own people. We’ll move as skirmishers. Keep about ten yards between men.” He waved the radio. “I’ll coordinate fire support. Any questions?”

  There were none. Hanlon took one fire team and deployed it deeper into the woods. Sledge deployed the other with its right flank guiding on the wood line at the edge of the airstrip. With everyone positioned in the skirmish line, Sledge signaled the move forward. His mind worked mechanically, as he had trained it, but that didn’t keep his heart from pounding against his ribs. He knew every man in his group felt the same or worse, and yet they moved like the well-disciplined soldiers they were.

  High explosive rounds rained on both sides of the airfield. From the guerrillas, it seemed to be direct fire from rifle grenades or rocket-propelled grenades. The airborne forces’ mortars were ranging in on the guerrilla position.

  Using the radio, Sledge explained his plan to Colonel Kwasek and asked that supporting fires be lifted on his request. The colonel agreed and called back several minutes later to say fire support had been coordinated. Sledge suppressed his rebellious thoughts about Murphy’s and O’Toole’s Laws and kept moving his group forward.

  A few days before, when he’d covered this ground with Kristin, he’d been careful to avoid making noise. This time, the din of battle drowned out the racket his group made while forcing its way through the brush. All of his men that he could see moved forward professionally—bodies balanced, weapons held at port in front of their chests, heads up and looking well ahead. With each step, the sound of small arms and incoming mortar rounds grew louder. Soon, through the trees, Sledge caught faint glimpses of the mortar shell bursts.

  At about eighty yards from the bursts, Sledge called for supporting fires to be lifted. He kept his men moving forward. Moments later he received a report that the last round was on the way. This was crunch time. His twelve-man force was attacking an entire company, with only surprise to throw the balance in their favor. T
he next five minutes would decide success or failure and perhaps life or death. Sledge gritted his teeth and gave the order to open fire.

  It began as area fire, directed at likely positions rather than specific targets. Then they sighted a few guerrillas deployed along the wood line, and Sledge’s men took them under fire. Surprise was complete. The first four or five guerrillas fell before they could defend in the new direction. Those farther along the wood line turned and engaged Sledge’s group. Bullets thudded into trees and ricocheted away among the branches. The man on Sledge’s left fell, but Sledge and the others kept driving forward. They disposed of that enemy squad and took on another beyond it. Those farther along could not respond to the threat from an unexpected direction until it was too late.

  Guerillas began to throw down their weapons and raise their hands. Sledge detailed one man to handle the prisoners and then continued the assault. Up ahead, a guerrilla tried frantically to rally five others. Sledge dropped him with one shot. The others raised their hands in surrender.

  That ended organized resistance, and the surrender became general. The prisoner count totaled thirty-three. Sledge reported the objective secure, and a company from across the airfield moved in to relieve him. As soon as that commander had things in hand, Sledge gathered his group and found that three were missing, including Major Hanlon. Taking medics with them, they hastily retraced their route. One man was dead, another severely wounded. The third was Major Hanlon. They found him propped against a tree, white-faced, grimly tightening a tourniquet on his upper leg. A bullet had shattered his shin bone.

  “Well, you got here quick enough,” he said to Sledge. “I guess I won’t be jumping for a while.”

  Sledge patted the major’s shoulder and left him in care of the medics, then led his remaining men across the airstrip toward the weapons factory. The aftermath of combat’s adrenaline rush left him drained. The successive hilltops of his dream flitted through his mind. The fight with guerrillas had been an unexpected one, but now others loomed ahead.

  Before today, his hatred for the unknown man who’d created the weapons factory had been based solely on Kristin’s photos of the second massacre. Now Sledge’s motivation for his hatred expanded to include all of today’s dead and wounded on either side. Someday, he swore to himself, that man would be hunted down and brought to justice.

  As the factory came into sight, he pushed those thoughts aside and dismissed his own fatigue. That was what he’d come for. Heaven only knew what he would find inside.

  22

  Denver, Colorado

  Roger Brinkman came early to his office and immediately asked for the latest position of Steve Spinner’s ship. Food and medicine for North Korea? The Preening Peacock’s deviation from course to the Panama Canal suggested it was up to shady business, and Raúl Ramirez had overheard Spinner making some kind of a deal involving chemical weapons. Brinkman had followed the ship’s position closely as it sailed eastward through the Straits of Florida, first past Cuba, then eastward past Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. One of the tracking devices went silent as the ship passed Hispaniola. There was no way to know whether the device simply quit or had been discovered by the crew. So Brinkman’s hope of finding the ship’s next port then depended on a single tracking device.

  If the Preening Peacock continued on an easterly course, it might be that the captain was simply taking the long way around to North Korea. Traveling those extra miles through the Indian Ocean made little sense, but it was still a possibility. But then, just past Puerto Rico, the ship turned south into the Anegada Passage between the Virgin Islands and Antigua. Brinkman’s pulse quickened a bit then. This route suggested a possible rendezvous of the ship with the unidentified aircraft reported flying northeast from Colombia.

  So this morning he called for the report. His man entered with a sad face. “Sir, that last tracker has gone dead. We have lost the Preening Peacock.”

  Brinkman turned and studied the map on the wall behind him. Where was the ship headed? It could turn west to Saint Croix or east to Saint Christopher-Nevis. Or it could continue south. His eye traced the island chain: Montserrat, Guadaloupe, Dominica, Saint Lucia—even Trinidad. A hundred ports or more, and no way to choose among them.

  How could he ever muster enough manpower to check them all?

  ****

  At the factory, Colonel Kwasek greeted Sledge and his group with a hearty handshake and thanks for their work. “I’ll make sure you get full credit,” he said before handing the decontamination team over to his intelligence officer. Because of possible danger, no one would be allowed inside the factory until the decon team declared it safe. Kwasek also said a small medical aircraft would arrive soon to evacuate the wounded.

  “We’ve taken quite a few prisoners,” he told Sledge and led him to a holding area some fifty yards away. Nearby, the bodies of guerrilla casualties had been collected. Sledge paused there, sickened as always by the continuing tragedy of wasted humanity. He himself had killed more than his quota of men, always as necessary dirty work in a succession of noble causes. But it still sickened him. He’d spent many hours thinking on this, and it always came out the same. His head told him that someone had to stand against the forces of evil. But doing it always made him heartsick.

  Among the stiffening corpses lay that of Diego Contreras. Sledge viewed it with no emotion except relief. He’d wanted revenge but hated himself for wanting it. Now he felt grateful that the problem had been taken out of his hands. Justice had been done, but not by him in a moment of hatred.

  “Someone you know?” asked Colonel Kwasek.

  “Yes, sir,” Sledge said. “He got what he deserved.”

  “Señor Sledge!” The call came from the prisoner holding area. The speaker was a bedraggled Latino Sledge had never seen before. The man sat cross-legged about thirty feet apart from the other prisoners, guarded by an airborne sergeant first class with a bruised and swollen face. The sergeant grinned at the prisoner and ran his fingers along the blade of an M9 bayonet which appeared to have been sharpened with a file.

  “He says he’s Tomás Rodriguez, the guerrillas’ deputy commander,” Colonel Kwasek said. “Sergeant Gonzales there was part of the advance recon party. The guerrillas took him prisoner, but he turned the tables on them. He frightened one whole group into surrender, and he seems to have taken a personal interest in Señor Rodriguez.”

  Gonzalez grinned wider and waved the bayonet in front of Tomás’s face.

  “Señor Sledge, I must talk to you,” Tomás said. He glanced apprehensively at the sergeant with the bayonet.

  Two sergeants from the prisoner interrogation team circled behind Tomás and took notes.

  “I don’t remember you,” Sledge said. “How do you know me?”

  “You were watched while you trained the Salinas family’s security force. That was before I was put in prison.”

  “You were in prison?”

  “Sí, señor.” Tomás lowered his gaze. “I was one of the three that Señor Serrano was going to prosecute when the comandante had him killed. I am sorry that his wife and daughter were also killed and you were wounded. I did not know about that until later.”

  Sledge felt the familiar cannonball forming in his stomach, but he ignored it. He had a mission to accomplish. “Tell me about this building and what is done in it. Tell me about the men of Chozadolor.”

  “You know about that?“ Tomás threw another apprehensive glance at the sergeant with the bayonet. “In the building we make a thing that kills in a terrible way. A man named Williams—I think he is English—made a deal with the comandante to make it here and send it by air to some place in the north.”

  “Where in the north?”

  Tomás raised his palms before his shoulders. “I do not know. The man Williams would not tell us. The comandante was most angry about that.”

  Sledge tried not to let his disappointment show. “You didn’t send everything north. What about Chozadolor?”

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p; “It was most terrible.” Tomás again looked down. “The comandante kept some of the chemical shells for an attack on our government. We planned to move the shells tomorrow and use them in Bogotá the day after. He would become the new presidente, and the weapons would make him feared all over the world.”

  This information rocked Sledge back on his heels, but he kept his face expressionless. “What did this Mr. Williams say about that?”

  “He did not know. He was most angry that one shipment was not complete, and he came here to complain. The comandante stared him down. Señor Williams threatened to send our supplies to another place, but that was all.”

  “And Chozadolor?”

  “Before the comandante could plan his coup, he had to know how the weapons would work. He dressed our soldiers as our enemies in the Autodefensas Unidas and took all the men from the village. From these he chose twenty for his tests and killed the others.”

  Sledge gritted his teeth. The reports had spoken of dismembered bodies and wholesale butchery.

  “The twenty we placed near here in a clearing where we set off three of the shells we had made. They died in minutes, so we knew the shells would work. Then the comandante finished his plans for the coup.”

  “And the women who found the bodies?”

  “They had to be held until after the coup. We used the kidnapping as a cover story. We would have let them go when the coup was complete, and the comandante spoke of returning Señor Spinner’s money then. They had worked together in Nicaragua.”

  Sledge found the note about Spinner particularly intriguing. He could see that Tomás wasn’t telling the complete truth about something, but he couldn’t figure out what. He’d have to leave that to later interrogators.

  Further questioning revealed that Tomás did not know the locations of any other factories, and all he knew of Williams was a phone number. Sledge and the other interrogators noted it down. It nettled Sledge that Williams must have been the dark-haired man he and Kristin had seen at the factory, and yet they had no means of tracing him. Not unless Brinkman succeeded in tailing the blond hulk they’d seen in the Bogotá terminal. Convinced that he’d milked Tomás for all he could get, Sledge left him with the bayonet-wielding sergeant, who grinned and stroked the blade lovingly. Sledge returned to the factory door, where the decontamination team and Colonel Kwasek’s intelligence officer had gathered.