The Night of the Rambler

by Montague Kobbé

  The drumming of shots fired at the generator had put Ronnie on full alert, and now the loud blast of Alwyn’s gun, together with the blindness that grabbed hold of his eyes, the burning feeling that grasped his throat, and the rotten smell inside the station—a smell of powder, a smell like de buildin’ up in flames, a smell like de devil self ’bout to show up to fork every one of ’em straight into hell—simply made him forget everything about the mission, his duty, his comrades, or even his son, and, making use of the darkness into which they had finally been plunged, darted out the door, feeling his way up Burt Street, stumbling from side to side as he searched for his Austin truck.

  Whitty, meanwhile, in the darkness of the station, came to realize he was not fatally wounded. He was, however, blinded by the tear gas, and though he had drawn the pistol he kept behind his back, he was as good as useless. Alwyn’s cover had served to take the attention away from him, and two policemen arriving from the second floor fired in the general direction of the doorway. Alwyn had anticipated this reaction and had taken shelter behind the wall. Whitty, desperate, fired two blind shots that landed in the radio system. The darkness and the tear gas had dispensed with the last trace of orientation in him and he now spun around in circles, right arm outstretched, gun firmly pointed at nothing, left arm curled upward, as if he were a cowboy in a rodeo trying to hold firm to a raging bull beneath him.

  The four men inside the telecommunications room were suffering from the same delirious agony as Ronnie and Whitty, and their cries got confused in the general hysteria. Then came Whitty’s turn to let out a choking sound that turned into a loud grunt which woke Alwyn Cooke from his static shock. Alwyn reloaded his carbine, double-checked the cylinder in his .32 pistol to make certain he had six bullets to spare, and, in one movement, rolled out of his hiding place, arms opened at roughly forty-five degrees from his head in either direction, fired two shots from the pistol in his left hand and four in quick succession from the carbine. Whitty, I comin’ for you, nuh! He glided around as he crossed his arms, guns pointing in opposite directions, let out another shot from the pistol, three more from the M1, which now jammed, so he threw it in anger as far as he could and with the same impulse grabbed hold of Whitty by the collar of his shirt and pulled him out of the room, emptying the rest of his pistol in three different directions as he backed up into the road.

  Not a single bullet fired by Alwyn Cooke came anywhere near the policemen in the station. Indeed, most of them had flown into the roof of the building. But everything had happened so quickly, it had all been so implausibly violent, that nobody inside the station had had the presence of mind to fire back. Constable LaRue, for one, had been busying himself with a canister of tear gas, against which he stumbled as he sought shelter from Alwyn’s storm of bullets. As soon as he could lift his head, Constable LaRue grabbed the burning can and threw it hard toward the doorway, such that, as Whitty crossed the threshold, a wake of gas whipped through the space between his downcast head and Alwyn’s crazed expression. The Anguillians were out of the station, the tear gas now clouding Burt Street with a distinct yellow hue. The gut reaction of the policemen inside was not to follow the gangsters, but to slam shut the side door and lock themselves in the relative safety of a tear gas–infested room.

  Meanwhile, the men from Cayon Street were caught off guard by the round of six shots that had announced to the night the beginning of a nameless operation. Although the watch on Sol Carter’s wrist read three twelve a.m. and the whole affair ran with a delay of a good two hours, Sol’s first reaction was, Wha’?! Dem go in ahead of time. He meant, of course, that the men from Burt Street had not awaited the blast from the Defence Force camp. More likely than not, Sol Carter was aware of the disastrous implications this would have for the successful siege of the military camp and, ultimately, for the whole operation, but right now there was no time to think about that, because right now there was no time to think at all, just to act conclusively and boldly, and so, Sol Carter instructed the O’Farrell cousins, You, come wit’ me—you, cover we, and he and Desmond made their way to the front door of the police station, while Dwight looked out for any danger.

  Quite understandably, however, the police station in Basseterre was closed at quarter past three in the morning, and while this was by no means a fortified complex of the kind of, say, Brimstone Hill, neither Sol Carter nor Desmond O’Farrell had any specific ideas as to how to gain access to the brick building. Desmond’s reaction was to empty the magazine of the .25 handgun he carried in his back pocket, which totally obliterated the lock but did little else to solve their problem, because the front door of the station was bolted, and no matter what the Hollywood-fed imagination of the two freedom fighters dictated, the door would simply not give to the pathetic attempts by Desmond to kick it down.

  Suddenly, all the parsimony of the two front men was drained by a shot from Dwight O’Farrell, sheltered a few yards back, behind a car. But this time the policemen did return fire, sending Sol and Desmond running in opposite directions. From that point onward, the men from Cayon Street would assault the police station from three different angles at varying intervals, making the men inside the station believe that there were many more rebels outside than there really were. The battle turned intense for some time, until the policemen figured they could not be hurt from the outside. Then, no further shots were heard from the station, except for when the Anguillians made any attempt to reach the front door. For the rest of the night Sol Carter and Desmond and Dwight O’Farrell would fire volley after volley of unanswered shots, but the contest was at a deadlock, and the Anguillians found themselves on the losing end of the draw.

  Shi-it! was all that Harry González could muster as his head swiveled in the direction of Basseterre, where the distant drumming of shots fired ahead of time left the men inside the Defence Force camp wondering what the hell was going on. Harry’s hands continued fiddling away as he taped the wires that went from the recycled sticks of dynamite to the detonator. The six shots coming from the hand of Ronnie’s child had sunk into the empty darkness and the loud roar of Alwyn Cooke’s M1 had already reverberated in the distance, before Harry was ready to hand the dynamite to Glenallen Rawlingson to place in a small hole by the side of the building.

  By far the youngest of the men who had landed on St. Kitts, Glenallen Rawlingson could not find the courage to refuse to play his part in the operation, to sprint the final hundred yards or so to the Defence Force camp, to dig a hole right next to the building, to place the dynamite inside it, in contact with the pink concrete structure, and to race back unseen to the position where his comrades awaited him. In fact, Glenallen Rawlingson would have been perfectly happy to perform his duty, had the site chosen not lay directly opposite the largest graveyard he had even seen in his life. Is more dead people living in dere dan ever was in Anguilla, man, and the limestone tombs seemed to gain an eerie glow in the moonless night. “No good t’ing kyan come from vexin’ de deadman so” was the thought that most troubled the boy’s mind, as Harry González explained to him what he should do once he reached the wall surrounding Camp Springfield. But Glenallen did not find it in him to express his utter terror to Rude Thompson, or to the three American mercenaries standing next to him, because once he had weighed his options for a moment he realized that there was no way out of this one, and that he was forced now to either face the wrath of the living, armed to their teeth and ready to murder; or to vex the dead, whom he could not see but he sure as hell could sense.

  Thus, Glenallen Rawlingson, far removed from his skin with fear by now, made it to the Defence Force camp unobserved and reasonably quick; once there, however, he stumbled, and he thought he heard the twigs on the ground at the cemetery stir, and he felt a hidden presence pushing him against the ground, and a shadow raced past the corner of his left eye, though he could see no creature to correspond to it, and he was certain he felt the weight of boots pounding against the floor, running in his direction from the monume
ntal Springfield Cemetery just a few hundred yards to his left, and he thought he noticed eyes watching him—through the sights of shotguns, perhaps—and he had no shovel, no pick, no axe, no tools to dig the hole, and the soil was dry and hard, and his hands could barely get any depth at all, and “I be damned if I comin’ back here t’night,” so he just placed the sticks of dynamite on the ground, and he surrounded them with a handful of stones that lay scattered near him, and he balanced the bundle between them, and then he got on his way back with his peculiar gait, carefully unrolling the wire as he retraced his steps, until he gave Harry González its bare ends.

  Good job, kiddo! and Harry González did not notice the drops of sweat flowing from the temples of Glenallen Rawlingson’s head, his crazed eyes, his dried-up mouth, and the overall agony that gripped his spirit, as the American rolled the peeled cables around the two poles of the detonator, before Boom!

  A small puff of dust and smoke tainted the night with a blotch of gray as it rose from the ground along the concrete structure of the building, but soon enough it was evident that the wall of the camp had suffered no damage at all and that the siege of the garrison would prove a lot harder than initially imagined. There was no time to bicker, and it would forever remain unclear whether the blame really lay on the young Anguillian, or whether the dynamite had been too damp in the first place, the new sticks not sealed properly, or whether the recycled material had been contaminated with dust and sand and a touch of spite from the ghosts residing in Springfield Cemetery.

  Whatever the case, Glenallen Rawlingson escaped a vicious scolding from Harry González, whose Fucking moron! simply served as prelude to his final instructions. It was well past three thirty in the morning by then, and the only hope for the Anguillian cause was to take advantage of the confusion inside the Defence Force camp to take the whole place by storm. In the distance more blasts resounded, providing the men inside the camp with vague details of a battle that was not meant to take place.

  Harry González led his group from the front, firing left and right at the sentinels deployed around the military complex. He assumed the attention of the commander inside the garrison would be turned toward the area where the dynamite exploded, toward an assessment of the damage it had inflicted. That was all the time they had to skirt around the building and try their luck by the front entrance. Which was no time at all, because the main entrance was heavily guarded on the quietest of days, which is why the Anguillians had planned to break into the building through one of its side walls; and even if the rebels made it past the main entrance, once inside, they would be outnumbered by at least twenty to one. Harry’s plan, however, was not to break into the Defence Force camp but, rather, to trap the army men inside. This would give the rebels by the police station enough time to move according to the plan and, ultimately, to gain control of the central government.

  To this effect, the five men fired incessantly upon the military base for some twenty minutes. But much like what had happened to Sol Carter and the O’Farrell cousins on Cayon Street, the reply this crew got was, actually, no reply at all. Following a short exchange with the four guards by the main entrance, the army inside Camp Springfield opted to stay sheltered behind the thick concrete walls and wait it out until the light of day brought some clarity to the proceedings. Harry González was happy to play the waiting game: thinking the men by the police station would be able to carry out their part of the plan, he kept the thick of St. Kitts’s military force in check for well over an hour. It would not be until half past four in the morning that he would take his men down from the hill at Springfield and onto Cayon Street, either to join the triumphant rebels or to make a desperate dash toward Half Way Tree. Little did he know that, by then, The Rambler would no longer be there to take them home.

  CHAPTER II

  RETREAT!

  The first ones to call off the operation and cut the rest of their men loose were Alwyn Cooke and the blinded Whitford Howell. Deafened by his own exertions as the modern-day Wyatt Earp, Alwyn never heard the thumping blast of the dynamite explode one or two miles away from the police station. Whitty had dropped his M16 in the telecommunications room, and Alwyn had dismissed his M1 carbine as soon as it jammed during the rescue mission of his friend and comrade. Consequently, both were left with only .32 pistols and a handful of bullets. The noise from Cayon Street, just around the corner, intimidated Alwyn, who was as good as alone with Whitty suffering the consequences of his extreme fear of death and Ronnie’s decision to activate a canister of tear gas to evacuate a room that had already been taken without a fight. Standing underneath a lamppost on Burt Street, Alwyn fired three shots before he managed to hit the bulb that shone on him, and he briefly considered his options.

  Get up, nuh, man—we gotta go!

  Whitty had no strength left to ask where, he just followed, a blur filling his eyes, a burning sensation tormenting his respiratory tract, his right arm on Alwyn’s shoulders, feet dragging underneath him, trying hard as he could not to fall while his comrade carried him, almost, back up Burt Street and along Lozac Road, half-hoping they would find Ronnie’s truck where they had left it.

  But Ronnie was long gone, of course, and so was his truck, so Alwyn kept walking in and out of the shadows of the night with Whitty hanging from his shoulders until they reached the end of Lozac Road, and then they turned north at Park Range and intended to head out of town by whatever means possible, even if it meant walking it, and Gimme dat, and Alwyn tossed the two pistols as hard as he could into a bush on the side of the road, even though he could still hear the rounds fired at the police station by the men on Cayon Street, and now he heard, too, in the distance, the echo of shots fired at the Defence Force camp, and Lord, forgive us! though even he did not know whether he asked the Lord to forgive the men aboard The Rambler for coming to St. Kitts to raise this unstoppable hell, or whether he meant only himself and Whitford Howell, by now almost a part of his own back and shoulders, for deserting their comrades.

  But no sooner had Alwyn uttered his little prayer than he saw a car parked by the petrol station about half a mile ahead, and Jus’ preten’ you real drunk, okay? and Whitty’s nod got lost in the darkness of the night, because Alwyn wasn’t even looking in his direction. Not that it mattered at all, because Whitty did not have to pretend to anyone that he was drunk, simply because there was no one to be seen for miles in the quiet of the Kittitian night, and when they reached the petrol station they found the car unlocked, as was to be expected, and the keys by some small miracle in the ignition, so in no time at all the two men were racing up Park Range and turning left toward the western end of town, and turning left again to reach Old Road, which would take them through Challengers and Old Road Town, and finally all the way back to Half Way Tree.

  Alwyn’s pulse quickened behind the wheel as he thought, with every pothole he hit, with every bend he took along the road, that a tire might just blow, that something might go amiss, that their great escape might still go wrong. But Alwyn’s worries proved ill-founded as he and Whitty reached the dark, ugly bay of Half Way Tree sometime before five in the morning. Out at sea, the men on The Rambler were getting ready to head back southward, but Alwyn remembered the sequence of lights they were supposed to exchange with the Kittitian boat off Sandy Hill Point, and Gaynor Henderson spotted the signals sent out by the car on the bay, and Alwyn and Whitty were so desperate to get out of there that they jumped straight into the water and swam all the way to The Rambler, where they were fished out by the remaining crew.

  Meanwhile, the siege of the Defence Force camp had come to an end. At four thirty a.m. sharp, after a long hour of periodic attacks against the concrete wall of the building, Harry González ordered one last heavy offensive led by the Browning M1919 machine gun handled by Titus Brown, before signaling the final retreat. They’re too afraid to face us in the night. We have an hour to get out of here, if we’re lucky. After that, we’re dead meat.

  The five men stooped on t
heir way down Springfield Hill, but once on Cayon Street the outlaws brazenly took to the main road, walking in a formation that oozed an air of invincibility, that identified them as the Caribbean version of The Untouchables.

  Except, once on Cayon Street, Harry González turned right and headed out of town, instead of leading his men in the direction of the shots that could still be heard coming from the area next to the police station. And Rude Thompson’s How you mean? did nothing to convince Harry González that we kyan’t leave dem men fight we fight alone.

  Each to their own, Rude. Harry walked on, M16 in his right hand, .25 in his left. You can join them if you want—but you won’t get out of there alive, if you do.

  Rude said no other word and simply moved along, puzzled about the man’s exit strategy.

  Harry González would have explained that if their comrades were still, over an hour later, fighting at the police station, it was unlikely they would be able to take it with or without the extra men; and even if they managed to capture the police station, Harry González would have argued, had he wanted to do so, in all likelihood the government had been informed of the attack already; and even if, Harry González might have continued, they managed to abduct Robert Bradshaw, even if they were to get hold of Paul Southwell, who or what was there to stop the hundred-plus-strong Defence Force from coming to their rescue the following morning?

  Harry González was acutely aware that the operation had gone sour, that they would be unable to accomplish their targets, and that the best they could hope for now was to come out of this godforsaken jungle in one piece. Harry González would have explained the situation to Rude Thompson, had not his ticket out of that godforsaken jungle shown its headlights less than a quarter of a mile up the road. The run-down Morris van making its way into town drove straight into the barrels of Harry González’s M16 machine gun and .25 handgun, each pointing at a different eye of the driver’s head from the end of his outstretched arms. He didn’t even have to say a word: as soon as the Kittitian made out this strange jumbie jumping him on the road in the middle of the night, he stopped the van in its tracks and ran for cover into the mottled darkness of Springfield Cemetery.