Cody's Army

by Jim Case

  “1 guess you do.”

  Cody let nothing show in his expression or voice.

  “It, uh, had to be this way, John.”

  “Did it? Tell me about it.”

  “Aw, hell, Cody, I didn’t give the goddamn order, y’know. I follow orders. You know how hard it is, getting our people funded down here. I, uh, guess it was figured that a few martyrs were needed. It will look like the Sandinistas did that back there. You and Lopez’s boys got there to take them out, but too late.”

  Cody nodded.

  “Too late,” he echoed, a low, dangerous growl, and this time some of what he had been carrying inside since the mission must have come to the surface because Gorman got a worried look on his face and stepped back.

  “Anti-Nicaraguan sentiments will be fanned to a blind hatred,” Gorman went on. “That’s what we need, if we want to serve America’s interests. Getting money out of a tight-assed Congress will be a cinch now.”

  “And that’s why those four women lost their lives?” Cody asked. “I just want to be sure, Jack. We murdered those women because it was our job?”

  He could not help the rising inflection on that last word.

  Gorman heard it too. So did Snider, behind and to Gorman’s left. And so did the contras, who started to turn toward the confrontation with mild amusement.

  Gorman tried to chuckle, but it came out a sour, grating sneer.

  “Hey, Cody, I thought they were sending me a pro. You’re not one of these dopes who still believes in right and wrong, are you?”

  “I guess I am,” Cody replied in a bare whisper.

  He pulled up the M-16 he had been holding and opened fire.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Fourteen Months Later…

  He could tell instinctively that the first three human beings he had seen in more than a month meant trouble.

  He had been about to set out to check his traps after breakfast, after his first drink of the day. The whiskey had felt as good as ever burning his throat to release that first glow of warmth in his gut that meant the day was really beginning.

  Cody had almost come to enjoy the short stretch of time during the preparation and eating of his breakfast, before that first drink.

  The scent of the pines and the crisp bite of the Canadian mountain air packed an almost painful nip that was strong enough to wake a man with a clear head no matter how much he’d put away the night before. Morning was a time when the world was nothing but Cody in his cabin on top of his mountain, alone up there in a clean world that had barely changed since Time began.

  Times like those, he felt almost glad to be alive.

  Then, if he had not awakened with them, the images would surface from the subconscious to torture him, and there he would be once again, standing outside that country mission near San Jose de Bocay, staring down at what remained of four women of the cloth; staring down at their pulverized corpses twisted in palpitating attitudes of death, what was left of their faces registering expressions that cried pain and surprise, and the glazed eyes of the corpse that was a Sister named Mary Francine.

  That’s when Cody always reached for the bottle and began the drinking that would last all day and into the night until loss of consciousness granted refuge from grief and pain.

  He was pulling down and checking the heavy duty Weatherby Mark V bolt-action .460 Magnum hunting rifle from its rack above the fireplace. He always toted the big Weatherby and an Army issue Colt .45 automatic holstered at his right hip. A wide-blade, double-edged hunting knife was sheathed at his left hip.

  Old habits die hard.

  He had started out of the cabin, when the buzzer sounding stridently across the room stopped him in his tracks. He wheeled around and crossed to the electronic control panel, where he flicked off the alarm warning mechanism and activated the three closed-circuit television screens located there.

  The twelve-inch screens winked and shimmered to life, the center one picking up a late model station wagon as it bounced along the narrow, rutted, steep incline through the rugged pine forest that was Cody’s 100-acre corner of the world.

  That placed them one half-mile southwest of the cabin, no more than two or three minutes away.

  He flicked off the system, exiting the cabin at a run toward the high ground thirty yards from the structure’s back door.

  A few months from now, later in the year, he would have expected them. Hunters had ventured up the road as far as his cabin on several occasions during the preceding hunting season, despite the posted No Hunting and No Trespassing signs.

  He paused well into the dense, towering tree trunks.

  On those previous occasions, he had pulled back to this spot to watch and wait, and those hunters had realized the road dead-ended on private property and had steered their vehicles around and retraced their route away from his cabin site.

  These weren’t hunters, he knew. The time of year, and a quiver of foreboding that reached down inside him and squeezed, told him so.

  He remained standing, his back to the direction of the cabin, pressed against the trunk of a pine that had to be eighteen inches in diameter. He held the Weatherby perpendicular to his body and twisted around the trunk just far enough to peer down into the clearing around his cabin.

  The sigh of a cool breeze through the towering pines, and the earthy tang of nature enveloped him and he allowed himself to become one with the living, breathing wilderness around him.

  He was at home here.

  He knew those in the vehicle would not be, and that was his one advantage. They would be pros, he was somehow certain, as skilled in the art of tracking and killing as he was.

  The station wagon halted. He heard the driver kill the engine.

  A brief pause, then three men debarked to stand near each other but not clustered, two of them toting hunting rifles.

  Cody recognized the one in the middle. The one without the rifle; the agent in charge. The one who lifted his hands to his mouth to magnify his voice and shouted.

  “Cody!”

  Cody did not move, maintaining his position, his rising combat senses probing the thickly wooded wilderness around him in all directions for any sign of danger, but the only other presence he could detect was the trio down there by the cabin.

  Yeah, he recognized their leader all right. He’d known Lund all the way back to Nam, and had been on friendly terms with Pete right up until Cody’s abrupt leave from government service.

  The last time he had seen Pete, Lund had headed the CIA’s assassination unit.

  Cody rapidly considered his options. He had hoped they never would find him but had somehow always known they would if they really wanted to. A man cannot hide from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America any more than he can hide from his own past.

  He had taken every conceivable step to conceal his ownership of this land, and since leaving the Company under the cloud of what had happened in Nicaragua, he had not left his property line since arriving here except for a monthly sixty-mile round-trip down to the crossroads country store at the base of the mountain, the nearest outpost of civilization.

  He had remembered, from his long-ago days at Princeton, Plato’s dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Well, he’d given himself a life with nothing to do but survive up here mountain-man style the year around, alone with the wilderness and his past, with nothing more than the solitude and time to examine the life he’d led, but he could find no good in his life that could ever balance the scales for what he had been a part of on that last mission into Nicaragua; the atrocity that drove him to this Canadian mountaintop.

  Technically, of course, the massacre of those nuns had not been his fault, but such knowledge did little to erase the stark mental images of the bloodied, fresh corpses of Sister Mary Francine and the other three women at that little country mission.

  He had spent his time up here prowling this no-man’s land, hunting, trapping, tryin
g to somehow make sense of the ungraspable; of what was done and lost forever. He spent his nights hitting the bottle too damn hard but he had never let self-pity or guilt dull responses and reflexes and a soldier’s sixth sense earned in the hellgrounds of the world prior to his “retirement.”

  Lund stopped calling out his name from the clearing by the cabin, he and the two men with him standing in their loose cluster down there, gazing off in various directions toward the walls of pine that lined the ridges around the cabin.

  Cody noted that the two guys with Lund had their rifles aimed at the ground, not in firing position.

  He made his decision.

  A hawk chose that moment to soar into the clearing, riding the air currents high beneath the cobalt-blue sky.

  Cody left his concealment, not with any sudden rushing movement, but, rather, assuming an easy gait as he purposefully made himself visible to the others, as if he were coming upon the cabin, returning with no prior realization that Lund and his two pals were down there.

  He had to keep himself visible several moments longer than he intended because Pete had his eyes skyward, watching the hawk.

  Then one of the other men spotted him, shouting something that swung around the attention of Lund and the other man, and they all saw him then, which is what he had waited for.

  He whirled, lunging back into the shadowy interior of the half-lit world at the base of the pines that made the mountains a carpet of crisp green.

  Lund shouted something at him from below back there but he could not discern the words.

  He heard nothing but his own footfalls along the rocky trail that had been here when he bought this property. He did throw one look over his shoulder to make sure Lund and the others were after him.

  They were, the Company men hoofing up the incline in hot pursuit.

  He poured on the steam, his legs pumping, following the trail for several yards to where it dipped beneath the lip of a wrinkle in the terrain, losing him from the line of vision of the men dashing after him.

  They had not opened fire on him, and that decided him on what to do next.

  He jogged a dozen more long paces, then darted to his left, positioning himself behind another tree trunk amid a thick growth of conifers that would effectively block him from sight of the men giving chase; the reason he had chosen this exact spot fourteen months ago when he had gone about securing his hideaway.

  His erstwhile employers were the least of his worries, he had known all along. A man made enemies working for the Company and the many Cody had made would hardly be expected to give up the chase to even up old scores just because he had declared himself out of the game.

  So far, no one from his past had managed to track him down.

  Until now.

  They came over the ridge at the dead-heat gallop, Lund in the middle, the rifle toters evenly spaced from each other, not bunched together.

  Lund topped the lip of the ridge and Cody saw he toted a snub-nosed .38 revolver, as the three charged along the trail coming past where Cody knelt in the milliseconds it took before the three Company men had time to pull up with the realization that they had lost sight of him.

  The first man trotted by his place of concealment, the one in the lead, starting to slow when he realized Cody was not up ahead on the trail as they must have expected him to be.

  Lund and the third man slowed their pace.

  Cody waited until Lund was where he wanted him, then he leaned forward to a taut length of clear rope and he severed that rope with one swift cut, causing the trap to be sprung.

  The loop of the nearly invisible line snapped around Lund’s ankles while the tree limb it was attached to sprung up, released by the line severed by Cody, the loop tightening into a knot around Lund’s ankles and whisking him upward, head-over-heels upside down, the .38 flipping from his fingers.

  Too caught by surprise to even emit a shout of alarm before he was dangling upside-down like bagged game ready to be skinned, Lund ended up with the top of his head five feet from the ground.

  Cody bounded out from cover, the knife already unsheathed, the Weatherby swinging around in a punching arc, used as a club.

  The first man, in front of Lund, came around with a snarling oath at the commotion of Lund being hoisted topsy-turvy, but the guy walked into the sharp smack of the Weatherby’s ventilated rubber recoil pad buttplate across his right temple. His knees buckled and he went down.

  Cody pulled the Weatherby around, down into firing position on the third man before the first had fully collapsed upon the ground.

  Lund swung lazily back and forth, a human pendulum, cursing vividly, attempting to pull himself up and around, reaching up toward the knotted line around his ankles, but he could not bend himself back up far enough.

  The third man had his rifle nearly around in target acquisition, but abruptly ceased all movement like a robot with its juice cut when he found himself looking into the Weatherby’s muzzle.

  This one know weapons, thought Cody. He’ll recognize the rifle aimed at his heart. He’ll know the Weatherby fires a five-hundred-grain bullet that achieves the highest velocity of any bullet in the world. He’ll know what such a bullet would do to his chest if he made the slightest wrong move.

  “Drop it,” Cody instructed. “You don’t have to die.”

  The man dropped it.

  Lund continued swaying back and forth, not giving up the impossible task of trying to free himself.

  “Cody, damn you, you rotten goddamn sonofabitch. Let me the hell down from here!”

  Cody did not take his eyes or the Weatherby’s muzzle away from the bead drawn on the third man’s heart.

  “Handgun, too.”

  Lund shouted, “Cody, for chrissake—”

  “Shut up, Pete.”

  He watched the other man reach under his jacket and ever so gently remove a .44 Magnum from concealed shoulder leather. The man held the pistol by his fingertips, away from his body, and let it drop.

  An owl hooted from a tree somewhere nearby.

  Cody motioned with the rifle, directing the man to stand near where the unconscious figure of the first one lay sprawled.

  “Over there.”

  The agent obeyed, his hands raised, his mouth a worried, tight gash across a nervous face.

  Lund gave up struggling.

  “Jesus H., Cody, what the hell is this? Let me down, damn you—”

  Cody kept his peripheral vision on the agent standing with upraised hands next to his unconscious pal. He lowered the Weatherby so the snout of the muzzle nudged Lund’s nostrils none too gently, like the cold kiss of death.

  “You’ve been behind a desk too long, Pete. You bozos were too easy. How did you find me?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Lund bristled. “I didn’t find you. I was told where you were and I came, and this is the kind of a goddamn welcome I get!”

  Cody could not hold back a grin that was tight around the edges; the first grin he remembered cracking since he’d come here.

  “You’ve still got your balls, Pete, I’ll say that for you.” He applied a degree of pressure and the Weatherby’s muzzle nudged Lund’s nose not quite so gently. “What makes you think I won’t blow your Company head off for coming up here after me?”

  “Hey, hey, relax, John.” Lund’s voice took on a shading of panic that had not been there before. “Relax! I’m not with the old unit anymore. They gave me a new job.”

  Cody stepped back, removing the end of the Weatherby’s barrel from Lund’s nose, pulling the rifle away.

  “I came up here because I don’t want any part of you people, or of anyone else. I want you and these two clowns off my land or I will blow your heads off and I’ll take real good care of what’s left of you and no one will ever pin it on me. And when they send the next team, I’ll be ready for them, too.”

  “There won’t be any teams,” Lund insisted from his upside-down position. His swaying had stopped when he ceased struggling. �
�For godssakes, cut me down from here so we can talk, will you?”

  Cody mulled that over for a few seconds. He reached another decision. His right hand flashed across his chest and the knife blade glinted.

  The length of line stringing Lund up was snicked in two.

  Lund plummeted head-first down five feet to the ground, emitting a full-bodied thump and a full-throated yowl that lifted high above the treetops.

  “In a nutshell,” Lund said, some time later, “the U.S. government has decided to do something about its inability to cope with international terrorism; an inability that has reached crisis proportions.”

  Cody and Lund sat at the table in the center of the one-room cabin, Lund nursing with a makeshift ice pack the bruise on his forehead, Cody nursing a glass of scotch.

  The two Company agents Lund had brought with him loitered out front of the cabin near the station wagon, the one having regained consciousness, and he and the other having both been given their weapons back. Neither had tried to conceal their open resentment of Cody when Lund had instructed them to wait by the station wagon and keep their eyes open.

  Cody did not give much of a goddamn. He was not even sure why he was sitting here right now, listening to Lund.

  “I’m all finished working for you people, Pete. No more.”

  “I’ve tuned and greased one hell of a sweet machine,” Lund continued, as if he hadn’t heard. “And it’s all on orders right from the top and I am talking the Man, John. The Oval Office. I’ve been given a free hand. I’ve got the thing organized. I just need the right people, and it’s ready to happen. I want you in on it from the start—you’ll run the show, and you’ll take orders only from me.”

  Cody returned Lund’s level stare across the table.

  “You go to Hell, Pete. You and the Man.”

  Lund pretended not to hear that, either.

  “I’ve fought every step of the way to bring you back in.” A trace of a grin crinkled the Fed’s grim expression. “They had to give in, in the end. Every time they put all the specs they wanted into the computers, your name kept spitting back out at them from the top of every list of those best qualified to head such a unit.”