Cody's Army

by Jim Case

  “Must be a real dirty jobs unit, huh, Pete? Dirtier than Nicaragua?”

  Lund sighed.

  “You won’t let that one drop, will you?”

  “Let it drop?” Cody echoed quietly. “You weren’t down there. You didn’t see four women with their guts splattered out all over the goddamn—”

  “Okay, okay,” Lund countered uncomfortably, “but you did something about that, didn’t you?”

  “All except for Gorman,” Cody nodded. “He’s still working for you, I’ll bet, isn’t he? If he’d been a little slower while I took care of the rest of those scum, he’d be dead meat now, too.”

  “There weren’t any reprisals against you, were there, John? You took out Snider. You took out Lopez and those other contras. It took Gorman six months to recover from the wound where one of your bullets grazed him where he wasn’t protected by that vest. We deeply regret what happened and we cleaned house. The public never found out about what happened to those nuns. Dammit, John, you’ve been working for the Company since Nam. You know the left hand never knows what the—”

  “I’ve heard all of that,” Cody growled. “And I know the field agent who ordered that massacre bought the farm himself two weeks later in Grenada. That’s why / didn’t take any more reprisals.”

  “You were back at Langley being processed out when that happened,” Lund nodded. “That’s the only thing that stopped you from taking the fall for that one, and they would have terminated you if they’d thought you were behind that. As it was, they traced it to the Cubans.”

  “And now they want me back.”

  “I want you back,” Lund corrected. “I wish I could be as sure about the President. I think he realizes you’re the man for the job, but he thinks of it more as the evil to fight evil. General Johnson is still the Man’s principle advisor on covert military operations, and you know what a by-the-booker he is. I don’t think the general ever quite got over what you did down there in Nicaragua, and he’s got the Man’s ear, too. He seems to think you’re a wild card: that you can’t be trusted.”

  “Maybe he’s right. Have you thought of that?”

  Lund emitted an exasperated sound.

  “You are the sanest man I have ever known. And the meanest, and the most bullheaded. You’re the man for this unit I’ve been authorized to form, can’t you see that? The computers say so, I say so, and you know it’s so.

  “You will be given carte blanch to assemble, prepare and command an elite four-man commando unit intended to strike quick and hard in a crisis situation.”

  “The Army has Delta Force for that!”

  Lund shook his head.

  “Your unit will be strictly off the record, right from the git-go. You will operate ruthlessly, if necessary, to fight back as dirty as it gets with only one objective: your team goes in when delicacy or timing preclude use of standard military response like that of Delta Force; situations where a visible U.S. military response would endanger American security.”

  Lund paused; then, studying Cody closely, “Well, that’s my pitch. That’s why I’ve come here. What do you say?”

  Cody pushed back from the table, stood and walked over to the cabin’s window, where he gazed out at the two agents by the station wagon, but he was not really looking at them, or thinking about them.

  “You made the trip for nothing, Pete. There was a time when I thought there was a good fight worth fighting. No more.”

  He somehow found himself wondering about those words the moment he spoke them.

  Lund snorted angrily.

  “I may be taking my life in my hands saying this to a berserk guy like yourself, but you are one disgusting sight, do you know that? All alone up here in your little world while the real world is going to hell because there aren’t enough good men to fight what you call the good fight. Let me show you something. Come here.”

  Cody went back over to stand next to where Lund sat at the table.

  Lund reached into an inner pocket and withdrew an envelope from which he extracted a sheaf of six-by-ten-inch glossies, stark black-and-white wire service photos. He slapped them down on the tabletop one at a time, spreading them out for Cody to see, punctuating the slap of each grisly photo on the table with a curtly spoken caption.

  Slap. A shot of dead human beings in casual civilian attire; dead human beings—men, women and children—sprawled in what looked in the black-and-white photo like spreading pools of black oil, in front of a baggage-claim area.

  “Rome airport. Two months ago. Four terrorists walked in with concealed automatic weapons and opened fire; the four of them were killed, too, but not before they did this, and notes on their bodies claimed that this was just the beginning.”

  Slap. Tables and chairs overturned, decorated with inanimate remains only halfway identifiable as human.

  “Bomb planted in a London restaurant. No one’s really sure about this one, believe it or not. The IRA and the Libyans both claimed responsibility. The sick bastards actually fight over claiming atrocities like these as their own.”

  Slap. No bodies this time, only the charred, smoldering remains of a structure that had just finished burning to the ground.

  “A children’s hospital in El Salvadore. Twenty-seven dead.”

  Lund spread the remaining seven or eight pictures out across the table in front of him, indicating with an angry wave of his hand what Cody could see was more of the same.

  “This is from the last twelve months, and it’s only a sample. This is what is happening, John. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re giving them the edge. You’re helping them to get away with these kinds of things by not being out there doing something instead of wallowing up here in self-pity for a tragedy that wasn’t your fault. I know you’ve been through Hell and it was the Company’s fault, but damn it, John, there’s more Hell to come and the lines are being drawn. We aren’t perfect, God knows, and that means we need men like you all the more, don’t you see that? Come back, John. We need you. The whole blessed country needs all the men like you it can find at a time like this.”

  Cody set down the glass of scotch he had not touched since Lund began his pitch. He knew why he had allowed himself to sit and listen to an old friend who had come so far for something that mattered.

  Lund was absolutely right.

  “If I had to narrow it down to only three men in the world I’d want to take into combat with me, you know who they’d be.”

  An ear-to-ear grin split briefly the Fed’s face, then he got serious and very businesslike again, scooping up the pictures, returning them to the manila envelope.

  “I figured they’d be the same three we went through Nam with when you anchored your team there and I was the guy who handed you your assignments. Kind of brings back old times, doesn’t it, Sarge?”

  “Where are they, Pete?”

  “I had the three of them tracked down,” said Lund, “and they may be our next problem. They’re all three kind of unreachable.”

  “Last I heard, Caine was SAS.”

  “Was,” Lund acknowledged. “They gave him the boot about a year ago. Who knows why; no one talks in that outfit. And guess who he tied up with when he went looking for a job?”

  The glint in his eye gave Cody the clue.

  “You saying I won’t have to make that many stops to round up the old team?”

  “I mean just that. Caine and Hawkins teamed up to work a bounty-hunter scam out of south Texas.” Lund saw the question marks that must have brought and chuckled. “Don’t ask me. Hawkeye says the pickings for fugitive bond-jumpers is overripe down there and Richard seems to agree. They’ve got a very profitable business going for themselves.”

  Hawkeye Hawkins. A Charles-Bronson-goes-Panhandle sort of guy; a coarse, wiseacre Texan who was one of the best fighting men Cody had ever taken fire with.

  Richard Caine had been attached to Cody’s team in Vietnam and Cody knew of no better demolitions expert in the world than the dour, hard-as
-nails Englishman.

  He experienced a renewal of some life force within him which his sorrow over the fate of those nuns—for all mankind—had dammed up for too long, he now realized.

  The lines were being drawn, Pete had said.

  Damn right.

  “And Rufe?”

  Rufe Murphy. The black giant and best buddy who had piloted Cody’s unit in and out of more hot LZs in Nam than any grunts had a right to survive.

  Lund lost some of his enthusiasm.

  “Uh, now there we could run into a real problem.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Rufe’s been running a one-man charter helicopter service in Mississippi, but at the moment he’s in a jail cell awaiting trial.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Grand theft, auto.”

  “Anything to it?”

  “Hell, no. You know Rufe. He was banging the mayor’s wife.”

  “The mayor’s white?”

  Lund nodded.

  “And so’s the wife. And I think that cancels out your third choice. It’s like I said, John: Hawkins, Caine, Murphy…. unreachable, all of them.”

  “I’ll reach ’em,” Cody growled. He picked up the tumbler of scotch and pitched it into the fireplace, where it shattered ceremoniously; the closing of one chapter in his life, the beginning of another. With no looking back. He grabbed up the Weatherby, which was all he intended to take with him that he wasn’t carrying, and started toward the cabin doorway. “Let’s go, Pete. Let’s do it.”

  Lund hurried to catch up, murmuring to himself.

  “Well, all goddamn right. Here we go again!”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  The road appeared to stretch into infinity in either direction across the lean, sun-burnt desert lands fissured here and there by an empty riverbed with nothing else on the horizon except the occasional buttes—rosy pink now in the minutes after sunset. The western sky was a warm red, with wispy traces of scudding clouds just beginning to take on a purple hue.

  The only sign of life in the desert was the overworked engine whine of a four-wheel-drive vehicle eating up the two-lane blacktop from Chihuahua, eighty kilometers to the south, toward the U.S. border crossing at Presidio, Texas, sixty kilometers to the north.

  Hawkeye Hawkins had his eyes pasted to the rearview mirror.

  “Reckon this rodeo is about to pump into high gear,” he drawled over his shoulder to Richard Caine, in the back seat with a third man. “Looks like some of Ruiz’s boys have found out the boss man ain’t among them.”

  Caine, a sturdy, flat-muscled, handsome man, applied pressure to the 9mm Beretta he held pressed against Jesus Ruiz’s temple.

  “That best not be your crew, El Gato. If any shooting starts, lad, you’re going to catch the second shot fired.”

  Ruiz, who had been dubbed The Cat by drug agents on both sides of the border for his ability to walk away from death every time it came looking for him, appeared, in his silk shirt and pressed slacks, cool as a guy out for a Sunday jaunt, or maybe on his way to drop in on some border-town police chief with the month’s payoff.

  “Certainly those are my men,” he purred with barely the trace of an accent, his pencil-line moustache curved upward at the ends with his smile. “And you will not kill me, gringos. If I die, you most certainly will die. I suggest you pull this vehicle over at once and allow me to rejoin my friends, or I am afraid—”

  Caine rapped Ruiz sharply in the mouth with the butt of the Beretta.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said quietly.

  Ruiz lost some of his composure, his hands flying to his mouth with a yip of pain. He spat out red-specked pieces of teeth, cussing hotly in Spanish.

  “Oh-oh,” said Hawkins. “Trouble up ahead too, if I read this right.” Caine looked over Hawkeye’s shoulder, out the front windshield at what the Texan behind the wheel saw: a Jeep coming fast at them, growing from a dot on the horizon. A look over his shoulder told him the same kind of vehicle, behind, was gaining, too.

  “Trouble is right,” the Brit grumbled. “I thought this was going to be one of those easy ones, mate. I thought this whole bloody bounty-hunter business was supposed to be a piece of cake.”

  “There you go again,” Hawkins sighed, scanning either side of the road they roared down without slacking speed. “Always griping about a little hard work. You got to earn your pay once in a while.”

  Caine’s eyes followed Hawkeye’s.

  “That high ground to the right,” he said as if reading the Texan’s mind. “Those rocks. We can make them if we’re lucky.”

  “Luck’s got nothing to do with it, pard,” Hawkeye growled. “Hold onto your tea bags.”

  He palmed the wheel. The four-wheel-drive vehicle bulleted off the blacktop toward an outcrop of rock at the base of an incline toward one of the buttes, perhaps a quarter-klick away.

  The vehicles closing in on them veered off the highway the moment those drivers ascertained what Hawkeye was up to and began speeding in from different angles about one-half a kilometer behind, clouds of dust spiraling up behind all three vehicles as the four-wheel-drive led the pack toward the base of the butte.

  Ruiz watched his men closing in from behind.

  “You have no chance, Senors,” he gurgled between broken teeth. Crimson spittle stained his shirt. “You are outnumbered. The Jeeps will be in radio contact with others—”

  “You just don’t take a hint, do you, hairbag,” Caine sighed. He whapped Ruiz across the temple with the butt of the Beretta.

  El Gato’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slid to the floor of the backseat of the bouncing vehicle.

  “Now maybe we’ll have some peace and quiet,” said Hawkeye, glancing back out their vehicle’s rear window at the two Jeeps closing in fast from different directions. “At least for a minute or two,” he added.

  Felipe Gallegos set down the hand-held transceiver after having summoned reinforcements from the hacienda. He held onto the frame of the Jeep to keep from being tossed from the vehicle as the driver kept the accelerator pressed to the floorboard. His rifle rode between his legs, aimed up and out, and the three men in the back held on too as the Jeep bounced along off the road in pursuit of that four-wheel-drive vehicle up ahead. It was like riding a bucking bronco, but Gallegos, as the man in charge of security at Casa Ruiz, thought far more about what El Gato would do to him when this was over than the danger of being thrown from this vehicle, or of having to deal with the bounty hunters who had the boss.

  The two men could be nothing else, Gallegos reasoned as he cast a glance at the other vehicle, commanded by Sanchez, closing in.

  Bounty hunters.

  They were the ones you had to fear, and somehow they had gotten to Jesus during the siesta and Gallegos had not learned of it until the four-wheel-drive vehicle was seen racing away with a handcuffed Jesus Ruiz already in it.

  Up ahead, the vehicle reached the cluster of rock where the bare ground began its incline to become one of the sporadic buttes dotting the region.

  It could be worse, Gallegos told himself. At least we will get El Gato from them. We outnumber them right now ten-to-two, and it will be twenty-five-to-two when the others arrive shortly. The gringos would be promised safe passage. They would release Jesus. They would, of course, be slain, their bodies left to the buzzards and the jackals.

  Gallegos looked behind, to the west. The light of the western sky was fading but they still had another forty minutes of light. Enough time, yes. And this would teach the boss to stay on this side of the border, Gallegos hoped, where El Gato would not run the danger of having any more warrants sworn for his arrest in the States, which would bring more men like the two who had him now.

  He saw the four-wheel-drive skid to a stop and the two men alight from it.

  Where was the boss?

  The bounty hunters moved to one side of the car and pulled out what looked to Gallegos from this distance like a rolled-up rug. Then as the two
Jeep-loads of men closed in to within several hundred yards of that rock cluster, he saw with something of a shock that it was the boss!

  El Gato’s body landed roughly on the ground, and one of the men grabbed the unconscious Ruiz where the handcuffs linked his hands and dragged Jesus behind the rocks.

  The boss is going to be real pissed now, thought Gallegos, and the only way to get off El Gato’s shit list would be to fill those two gringo bastards so full of holes that the buzzards and jackals wouldn’t even bother with what was left.

  * * *

  Hawkins dragged an unconscious Ruiz roughly across the rocky ground to behind the cluster of boulders, where a shelf of level land, surrounded by brownish-green, bunchy shrubs, allowed him to look from higher ground down upon the converging Jeeps full of gunmen—rifles poking into the air from each bouncing, speeding vehicle like antenna on some strange desert predator.

  He dumped Ruiz against one of the boulders and turned to stretch flat across the ground, unholstering the .44 Magnum he wore leathered cross-draw fashion on his left hip.

  He called to Caine, “Better get a hotfoot on, limey. This here gunfight’s about to commence.”

  Caine spun from the back of the four-wheel-drive. He gripped an Ml match rifle equipped with a rifle grenade attachment and fitted with a Startron infrared telescopic sight. He shouldered a pack loaded heavy with grenades and ammo.

  “Had to fetch the peashooter,” he called back, jogging toward the boulders on the higher ground. “How’s sleeping beauty?”

  Hawkeye turned from eyeing the oncoming jeeps, now some five hundred yards out and zeroing in side by side.

  Jesus Ruiz groaned and mumbled something groggily and started to open his eyes and sit up.

  Hawkeye leaned over and cracked the drug dealer behind the right ear with the butt of the .44.

  Ruiz settled back against the rock to resume snoring fitfully.

  “A tad worse for the wear but still sawin’ ’em off,” he replied as Caine joined him. “Looks like we could be boxed in this time, Richard, old chap.”