MAMista

by Len Deighton

  ‘Setting us up for an ambush?’ said Paz. ‘So where will it come?’

  Singer said, ‘They will want a place with good communications so they can withdraw easily.’

  ‘A river,’ said Inez. ‘There is no other way.’

  ‘Two rivers would be even better,’ Singer said. ‘Two rivers, with a mountain trail that joins them. The security element covers the approach to the killing-ground, prepares the route of withdrawal and guards the rallying point.’ They were all wide awake now. Singer had described this place.

  Lucas said, ‘And the security element is behind us?’

  ‘Yes,’ Singer said. ‘Which means there is an assault element somewhere up ahead.’

  Lucas said, ‘And the commander will be with the assault element up ahead?’

  ‘That’s maybe who came this way. Just a small team to make contact. A bigger party would have left more traces.’

  There was another long pause.

  ‘How could they set up an ambush?’ asked Inez. ‘They don’t know which route we will take.’

  ‘Come along, girlie,’ said Singer. ‘You know better than that. How many ways are there? We can’t climb the summit of this heap without spikes, pegs and snaplinks. And I don’t feature sliding ass-first down that sheer drop. No, there is only one way down.’

  ‘But we don’t have to use the most convenient one,’ Inez persisted.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Singer agreed. ‘But we’d be sitting ducks if we came under fire on a tough gradient.’

  Paz said, ‘Are you sure there is another party ahead?’

  Singer said, ‘Everything points to it.’ He looked to Lucas. Lucas nodded in agreement.

  ‘In the British or American armies …’ said Inez.

  ‘In any kind of army,’ Singer said. ‘Since Philip of Macedon.’

  ‘Can we guess where they will attack us?’ Paz asked Singer.

  ‘Ask Lucas,’ Singer said. ‘He will quote the book to you.’

  Lucas said, ‘A mountain is what they call a terrain obstacle. In fact it’s the ideal one. If we choose one of those steep valleys for the final section of our descent we’d be in a high walled box: perfect! And if the trail doesn’t lead into a box, they can make a box using embankments, a stream or bamboo stockades. For added refinements they could also use mantraps and wired grenades and mines. It depends how fancy you get. The usual method of getting us into the killing ground would be by making us run for cover. We certainly must keep a very alert team up-front tomorrow. And we must make sure there is no bunching-up.’

  ‘So what were the guys in the boats after? Were they waiting for us? Were they working with the Pekinistas?’ Paz asked. No one replied. ‘Get some sleep, Santos,’ he said. ‘I’ll go back and take a look.’

  Lucas said, ‘Don’t let’s get too complicated. All we know for sure is that there are three fires. It could be hunters. Could be fires started by the sun.’

  ‘More of those guys who go hunting with machine guns?’ Paz said.

  ‘Lucas is right,’ Singer told him. ‘We’re just guessing. Anyway we have an edge on them. We know they are there; but they don’t know we know.’

  ‘If it’s Pekinistas trying to kidnap you and claim the ransom they’ll be careful how they attack,’ said Inez.

  ‘But we don’t have to be cautious,’ said Paz. ‘Right. Good.’

  ‘Someone must go back along the trail in the morning,’ Lucas said in that pedantic way he had. ‘Now let’s get some sleep.’

  Next morning they were still desperately tired. The wind had buffeted their campsite all night. It howled and stirred up the dirt and made them shiver with cold so that most of them had had little sleep. But now the wind had dropped and there was an uncanny silence. They had come back along the trail to this high ledge. From here they could see all the way to the river they had crossed so long ago. Above it now hung a curving white overpass of mist that spilled into the treetops of the jungle on each side.

  The eastern horizon was purple. Above it layers of cloud were rimmed with wire-thin orange edges. The wires thickened and turned yellow as the sun chewed at the horizon. The first molten blob of sunlight turned the landscape milky. Its rays poked at the hills and transformed misty valleys into glaring white lakes.

  ‘We’ll never see them in this,’ said Inez, but even as she spoke she was proved wrong. Hundreds of birds suddenly climbed up through the white mist. They circled for a minute or two and then sank down into the white fluff.

  ‘Get the bearing?’ Singer asked.

  ‘I got it,’ said Paz, no longer taking offence at Singer’s patronizing tone.

  Some other noise or movement – undetected from above – disturbed the birds again. They seemed uncomfortably close.

  ‘Just as I told you,’ Lucas said with exasperating satisfaction that he did nothing to modify. ‘The first climb. Near the stream.’

  Angel Paz turned away. ‘We’d better move it.’ From now on, his whole attention must be devoted to the route north. The going was easy at first over this treeless plateau. They were all revisited by the euphoria they had known on that first day. Seen from here the steamy jungle looked almost attractive. As they went Paz took bearings, and had Singer check them. Such bearings might prove useful in the days ahead if they caught glimpses of these mountains from the jungle below. From up here it all looked easy. They were like generals looking at a trench map and marking the places where other men would fight and die.

  The next mountain range – the Serpents – was about thirty miles north. It looked no more than a day or two away, even allowing for the hidden river that they knew must pass through the shallow basin ahead. But the first task would be to descend one of the rocky and precipitous spurs of the range they were on. The choice might prove fatal, and there would be no question of changing the route once committed to it. Even the gentlest of slopes would make difficulties for the mule drivers and for some of the men who were no longer truly fit.

  ‘Okay? Okay?’ called Angel Paz. It was a significant change from the hand signals and even from the ‘Let’s go’ that had replaced them. Now he spent as much time as Lucas watching for the accident before it happened, and worrying about the infirm and cursing the mules.

  The thinner vegetation of the higher slopes offered no shade. The hot sun burned into them. There were rhododendrons here and blue and white rock plants as well as wild coffee seeded by the wind from plantations more than fifty miles away on the far side of the peaks.

  Soon after they began to descend they encountered the dampness of the jungle and the bamboo. The men had learned to dread the first signs of the long slim leaves amongst the ferns and undergrowth. Without waiting for orders, Nameo and the ex-plantation workers unsheathed their jungle knives and moved up to the point position.

  Bamboo grows like a weed. It grows so fast that a patient botanist can watch the movement of its growth without a microscope, or without benefit of time-lapse photos. Each plant was strong and grew so close to its neighbour that not even small jungle animals could squeeze between the canes. The tubular stalks were hard and resilient, like some very tough plastic, so that the knife blades slipped and bounced upon the smooth bark. Patiently the men hacked a path through it. They were replaced every twenty minutes.

  It was not only the men at point who suffered in the bamboo. Ancient stalks made the ground as treacherous as glass marbles. On the steep slope, hands groped at the bamboo on either side and were gashed upon its leaves. Carlos, who was carrying the rifles of two comrades, slipped down a steep bank. Four men spent a strenuous half-hour getting him back to safety. Soon there were very few members of the party without some kind of injury, if only a nasty bruise.

  As the descent continued, the expectation of being attacked created a tension throughout the whole party. The men showed it in different ways. Angel Paz fussed more than usual. Singer became irritable and stopped his singing. Lucas was preoccupied and sometimes seemed to be lost in another world, his eyes
unseeing and his ears deaf to repeated conversation. Only Inez showed little or no change in her demeaour. She was determined to show herself physically equal to the men and this sustained her.

  Once down into the lowland jungle they arranged themselves into a battle formation. The guns were loaded. Novillo and Tito, his loader, kept close to the Hotchkiss machine gun. It was dark and steamy here. Sometimes the humidity reached a point where it made breathing painful. Mosquitoes, and tiny flies that drank from the corners of the eyes and the mucus of the nose, greeted them with renewed ferocity. That night no one rested properly. By dawn everyone was ready to move despite their lack of sleep.

  The next day the sky darkened and showers of heavy rain fell. The hills they had left behind them flickered with the blue lightning of an electrical storm.

  No longer did Paz order a long midday halt. Too many times such stops had caused muscles to seize up and made the next stage an agony. They all knew this and approved. Most of them smoked cheroots to help them stay awake and appease their hunger. The short stops didn’t give them enough rest and the short stops were now all they got. What Paz saw as tiredness, and what Singer called ‘the mañana syndrome’, Lucas knew was sickness. The jungle had started to select its victims.

  The ones who had grown up on a Western-style diet and environment found the journey difficult. They lacked the natural skills the Indians showed. They could not cut bamboo or sleep in wet mud. They were the choicest targets for mosquitoes and leeches. They suffered badly from the sores that wet clothing makes. But those city-dwellers had good general health. It provided them with resistance to many of the diseases they encountered. They were not anaemic. Their cuts healed and their coughs were not the lung-wrenching symptoms of pneumonia that Lucas was beginning to hear around him.

  The men remained cheerful but they did not talk excitedly as they had done at the beginning. No one now sang of the lovers of Teruel, or cheered or applauded some especially bold or foolish act. They were withdrawing into themselves, dwelling upon their aches and pains and sicknesses. The boils and sores that they had accepted as a part of their lives were now becoming ulcers from which they had seen men die. Their diarrhoea was becoming the bloody torment of dysentery that probed their bowels like red-hot needles and humiliated them with its stink and mess all day and all night.

  Some sort of fever seemed to be affecting them. Lucas noticed that some men were carrying the guns and the loads of others who did not have the strength to manage. The slight swellings of face, arms and legs that were just additional evidence of vitamin B deficiency were now developing into the flabby softenings that foreshadowed beriberi. Lucas worried about these men. He had made a secret wager with himself that the first man to collapse would do so before they reached the foothills of the next range: the Sierra Serpiente. He wondered what Angel Paz would do with the men who could march no more.

  Rain had flooded the central basin. Some of it had become swamp into which a laden man went up to his knees. Some of it was elephant grass, coarse fibres as thick as a man’s arm and eight feet tall. The steamy rottenness that was a part of every jungle had an added dimension here. Science denied it but there was a sweetness in the air, a smell of decay which men instinctively fear. This was the smell of fever.

  It was steamy hot. Neither fish nor man could traverse the semi-liquid lowland that meandered along the watercourse. Sometimes it inflicted long detours upon them as they followed the edges of huge mortlakes. No animal life survived in the basin except snakes, and of course the leeches, flies and mosquitoes which were not deterred by the heavy rain showers that descended without warning. Even birds and alligators avoided this region.

  Lucas walked ahead of Inez. His stumbling footsteps gave her a chance to avoid the softer ground, the rotting roots or the fallen timber as he encountered them.

  ‘The flies are worse now,’ Inez said.

  ‘Smoke,’ said Lucas.

  ‘I have no breath to smoke.’

  ‘Take this and have some smoke in your mouth.’ He passed his lighted cheroot to her. ‘It will keep some of the small ones away.’

  ‘It’s not the small ones that give me trouble.’ She took the cheroot and blew smoke so that the aroma of it was in her clothes and in her hair. There was a roll of thunder and the rain began again.

  Lucas caught her as she stumbled. Her body was hot under the cotton jacket. Fever. He was immediately concerned. An infection or a malaria attack now would be a sentence of death, and he would be the presiding physician. It was the doctor’s burden but now he resented it. He took her pulse. The others marched on past without seeing them. Their faces were hollow, grey and devoid of all expression.

  Her pulse was weak but not much faster than normal. Perhaps it was nothing. ‘I’m going to sort out a couple of tablets for you,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Just a tonic.’ It was a doctor’s joke. It was always ‘a tonic’. How many death-beds were bedecked with tonic bottles? Lucas smiled at her and then moved forward to take a turn with the jungle knife. He was not much use against the bamboo but up-front they’d hit a patch of thorn.

  Lucas slashed at the jungle with dispassionate energy. He feared and despised nature in all her guises. He was pragmatic: cautious and suspicious of everyone’s motives, especially his own. He glanced over to where Paz and Singer were talking to Santos and Rómulo, the surviving twin. They were briefing Santos for a detour that would take him half a mile to the east. Singer had this obsessional dread of being under fire pinned against a terrain obstacle. Santos and Rómulo would ensure that the flank was unthreatened.

  The contempt bordering on hatred that Singer and Paz had for each other – and the deep dislike which Lucas had for them both – had not lessened with the rigours of the journey. But, faced with a common goal, the three men had found a way of working together. Singer’s resilience and sense of humour found a response in Paz with his youthful optimism and moral outrage. But both men, and Inez and Santos too, granted Lucas a seniority that was never explicit. To what extent it derived from his medical expertise, his military experience, his cynicism or his age no one could say. But it was through Lucas that Santos was able to voice his fears and suggestions. It was through Lucas that Singer and Paz found mutual command.

  Lucas slashed at the thorn. Although till now he had been able to remain clinical about the medical state of the party, the idea that Inez might be sick made his fears personal and morbid. He toyed with the idea of hiding some of the medical supplies so that she could have a prior claim to them but there was no need to do that. He knew that every man on the march would gladly grant her his share of the medical supplies. Lucas had never served in an army like this one. However much he might despise their political dreams, hate the system they wanted to impose, and tell himself that he detested their methods of waging war, he could not deny there was some enviable bond between these men. It made them incomparably selfless and dedicated. Lucas, and the two cutters at his side, came to the end of the thorn. Here the real jungle began again. It became more and more gloomy as they moved forward into vegetation that joined overhead.

  When Santos and Rómulo left the main party they had to cut their way through the last of the thorn that stretched to the flank. Rómulo – robotically efficient since the death of his brother – worked hard but the two men made slow progress. Lucas thought it must be Santos when he first heard the gun firing. He saw the blue flashes lighting the jungle overhead. It was a shortcoming of Lucas and his expertise that he waited to identify the gun before grabbing Inez and falling flat on his face. Not an M-60; he knew the sound of those too well. About five hundred rounds a minute, he thought, too heavy for a Sten, too light for a point five, bursts too long for a BAR. Either a Bren or a Vickers.

  Singer was shouting something that Lucas could not understand. Then came two loud explosions, about one hundred yards to his right. One was a phosphorus grenade. It started a flicker of fire in the underbrush.

 
; Novillo had wrestled his Hotchkiss machine gun and dropped it on to the tripod that Tito, his number two, had thrown down into position. Novillo locked it into place. Carlos had the ammunition box open and was fiddling with a long straight metal clip. Carlos had never been under fire before. He was still fumbling with it when Novillo snatched it away and fed it into the breech, pulling the trigger almost simultaneously. The Hotchkiss was very loud. Its sound bounced off the overhanging trees. Its rate of fire was slow enough for Tito to find another clip in his satchel and hold it ready before the first clip was used.

  Singer blew four short blasts on his whistle. Singer’s worst fears seemed to have been realized. Only a few men at the head of the party were through the thorn: the firing was all to the right of them; to the left of them was swamp.

  Angel Paz sprinted back through the passage they’d cut through the thorn. He tapped men’s shoulders and got them moving and then rushed back again.

  Santos came running. Unable to find Paz he asked Singer for orders. ‘Make smoke!’ Singer said. ‘We need the cover.’

  Santos rummaged through his canvas bag. In his haste he grabbed one of the old coloured smoke markers that no one had ever been able to find a use for. He threw it as far as he could. There was a loud plop and the wind off the swamp blew delicate pink smoke across the front of them. Singer laughed. ‘Here come the gay guerrilleros!’ he shouted.

  ‘Small bursts,’ Paz called to Novillo, who could see no sign of an enemy and responded with a couple of very short bursts simply to show that he had heard.

  Paz ran forward to where Lucas and Inez were sheltering behind a tree. They were at the very front and there was firing from their right. Paz crouched over them. His face was running with sweat and his glasses were steamed up so that he pushed them up on to his forehead in order to see better.