by J. B. Hadley
FRONTAL ASSAULT
Mike Campbell slipped the safety on his M79 grenade launcher, sighted, and shot a grenade cartridge into the main by of guerrillas.
The explosion wiped out several men, frightening the others—long enough for the American merc team to open fire with their M16s. Mike followed with a second shell, scattering the enemy.
“Take cover!” Mike yelled at two of his men, who were standing in the open, blazing away like they were at the O.K. Corral.
They obeyed, fortunately, for a withering hail of lead was gunned their way by the surviving guerrillas. The rebels were gathered in four pockets that still out-numbered the mercs by more than two to one. The question was now, who had who pinned down?
Mike Campbell had an answer to that question. Using the graduated leaf rearsight, he aimed his M79 grenade launcher again.…
Also by J. B. Hadley
THE POINT TEAM
Published by
WARNER BOOKS
Copyright
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1985 by Warner Books, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56766-4
Contents
Frontal Assault
Also by J. B. Hadley
Copyright
The Devil’s Gate
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Devil’s Gate
ONE of the two men said something to him in “Spanish. He couldn’t understand a word, but he could see the evil glitter in the man’s eyes. It was the fat one, holding the car’s rear door open so he could reach in and pull him outside. This was the one who had sat beside him on the drive to this place, holding a lump of lead in his right fist and rapping him on the side of the head with his weighted knuckles anytime he made a move. He was dizzy. His head hurt. His groin hurt. He did not resist as he was pulled out of the car.
They had parked at the summit of an overlook. The city of San Salvador stretched out beneath, and the setting sun looked like a huge ripe peach in the haze of air pollution. The streetlights in some sections had been turned on.
“Cabron!” the fat man spat at him. “Cornudo!”
The thin man jutted a pistol painfully into his ribs. He found himself being forced to the edge of the overlook.
It was not a sheer drop, as at the edge of a cliff. But if he were pushed, he’d surely break something before he managed to hang on to a rock or tussock of grass to stop himself rolling down all the way. And there might be steeper drops farther down which he could not see from up here.
If only they’d try to communicate with him! Were they rightists or leftists? Rightists, he suspected. Yet, he could not be sure and took no chances. One wrong word could be suicide.
He had shouted his name at them, over and over, coming here in the car. He assumed at first it was a case of mistaken identity and that when they realized he was not who they thought he was—but an American citizen—they would release him.
Now he had come to think that these two men knew exactly who he was and had abducted him deliberately. Why?
They seemed to have no wish to make themselves understood to him. That was what was so frustrating! If he was going to be killed, he felt he had the right to know why.
He guessed they were only trying to frighten him. He wished he could find some way of telling them they had already done a great job. That he wouldn’t cause any more difficulties for them—if he ever had. That he would even leave the country if they wanted him to. Mariana. Not just manana, but on the first plane tomorrow morning. He couldn’t do any better than that.
He had told them all this in English on the way here. They hadn’t understood a word. Whoever was doing this to him should at least have sent along someone who knew a little English …
“Monte de mierda!” the fat man snarled at him.
The pistol muzzle snuggled into his left ear, and he felt the thin man watching him with whiplash anxiety—ready to squeeze the trigger at a split-second’s notice.
The fat man opened a straight razor. Its stainless steel blade mirrored the peach red of the setting sun.
The fat one took a step toward him, with the gleaming razor dangling casually in his right hand. He took an involuntary half step backward and felt his heels sink as the ground sloped steeply away. He could feel the emptiness of space at his back. The pistol muzzle pressed harder into his left ear.
The fat man now stood directly before him. His blubbery lips were curled back from his decayed teeth in a look of hatred and disgust. No one had ever looked at him with such intense loathing before. There was intelligence as well as dislike in those bloodshot eyes—this man knew who and what he was, and hated him for it. Why?
Faster than he could raise his shirt-sleeved arm to protect his throat, the razor’s honed edge struck at him.
The thin edge of tempered steel flicked through the strap of the light meter hung about his neck. The fat man stooped forward and caught the instrument in his left palm before it hit the ground. The fat one looked at it closely for a moment and then sailed it out into the empty air above the city lights.
The motionless, frightened face before him caused a satisfied On to spread from his thick lips to stubbled jowls. His razor streaked out again.
Before he could react to save himself, he felt the steel blade touch his head above his eyes. It hardly hurt—two light touches from something that was so precisely thin it was beneath the threshold of pain. The straight razor was withdrawn.
He slapped his hand to his forehead. When he lowered his hand, he saw what was imprinted on his palm. A cross of red in blood.
Chapter 1
SALLY Poynings, 20, blond, blue-eyed, sexy, a dropout from posh Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, drew all eyes wherever she went in El Salvador. She stepped from the bus she and her boyfriend had taken from the city of San Salvador. They had come to the countryside to see the “real people,” as her boyfriend put it. She looked about her.
Cinder-block huts with galvanized zinc roofs formed three sides of a dusty square. An adobe church with huge cracks running up the front, from steps to belfry, lay crumbling on the fourth side. A few withered trees leaned in the center of the square, and a pool of green stagnant water near where she stood gave off a bad smell. She slapped flies from her face and arms. As usual, people stared at her—thin dirty children with big dark eyes, an overweight woman with a basket of oranges on her head, a beggar on the church steps with scaly skin who could be a leper, a few men in sweat-stained shirts and battered straw hats.
Bennett, her boyfriend, panned his movie camera; and she obediently held the microphone in the heat-stricken silence, switching off the tape in time to the camera.
He grinned at her. “Fantastic place.”
She smiled fondly back at him.
Then their bus pulled away, the people inside peering down at them through the grimy windows. Sally watched the clouds of dust the bus had raised slowly settle.
“Sally, I got a feeling this place is authentic. These people are real people. What we film is going to be vali
d.”
“Yes, Bennett.”
She looked about again. Everything looked so hopeless. A metal Coca-Cola sign was nailed to the front wall of the nearest cinder-block hut. The sign’s red color was faded by the sun to pink, and there were clusters of bullet holes about the letter “o” in each of the words, without a single direct hit. Crumpled cigarette packs and orange peels were trampled into the dust at the doorway. Bennett was fooling with the camera again, so she pushed open the wood door with its flaking lavender paint and stepped into the cool, dark interior.
A heavyset middle-aged man sat behind a wooden counter stacked with merchandise. A brown curtain suspended on brass rings from a bamboo pole cut off the back half of the hut. The front half was lit by a window only a foot square—high in one side wall—and the interior walls of the hut were the same as the exterior: naked cinder-block. On a calendar picture, a soccer player was about to kick the ball, and behind glass in a frame a nearly stripped haloed saint was about to have his head chopped off by an axman whose outlandish costume suggested to Sally he was an Indian maharajah. She bought two Cokes, which were warm, and asked the name of the town—things like that were important to Bennett’s project; and since he spoke no Spanish, he had to rely on her.
Back outside again, everything had brightness and intensity as if the sun were a strobe that never flickered but just stayed blazing so that her eyes hurt.
“What a dump!” Bennett said gleefully.
He grimaced at the taste of the warm Coke, yet did not complain. Now was no time to bitch about conditions, here in the heart of the Third World. He had come to find the real truth about things in El Salvador once and for all, so he must expect to suffer a little or at least be inconvenienced once in a while.
“Shit, if I had to live in this hole,” Bennett went on, “I’d be a rebel too.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Sally said, looking nervously behind her. “Just because you can’t understand them doesn’t mean they can’t understand you. What do we do now?”
This was a reasonable question, since the only other person left in the square at that moment was the beggar on the church steps, and nothing moved except for two small pigs snuffling at the bases of the withered trees. Sally glanced at the pigs and added, “Don’t say we should hunt truffles.”
Bennett hadn’t noticed them. “Hey, you got a good eye, girl. Let’s use those pigs. Get in close with the sound.”
Sorry she had said anything, Sally adjusted her sound for the low-register grunts and high-pitched squeals of the two pigs. She was about to dart from the shade of the hut, along with Bennett, onto the burning sands of the square, when an army truck careened into the open space at high speed. It stopped, and soldiers jumped down from beneath its canvas covering.
Eight soldiers ran to one hut facing the square. One kicked the door off its hinges and all of them ran inside. Four other soldiers stood around the truck, automatic rifles slung from their shoulders, watchful.
Bennett was filming. Sally hurriedly turned on the sound.
Two men in their early twenties emerged from the hut with their hands held in the air. A soldier booted the second one in the ass as he came out behind him. Then a woman carrying a baby in one arm and holding a toddler by the hand was followed by a boy about seven and a girl about nine. Two soldiers poked them along with their rifle barrels. Finally an old woman appeared, arguing with the five remaining soldiers who brought up the rear of this procession. The soldier who had been guarding the two young men turned his back on them and returned to talk to the others.
Bennett spoke in that special tone of voice he reserved for the tape recorder. “The soldiers are now deliberately tempting the two men to try to escape so they can gun them down.”
The two young men seemed to agree with Bennett’s assessment of their situation, because they looked back and waited for the woman with the baby and toddler to join them. After this, all of them were hustled by the soldiers into the back of the truck. Bennett adjusted the lens for a final close-up.
“Senor!” The flaked lavender door of the cinder-block hut behind them opened a few inches. The man’s voice inside rattled on hoarsely. Bennett heard the words muy peligroso, and even he knew that meant very dangerous. Sally’s reaction was to grab him, spoiling a nice shot of the two pigs fleeing in tenor across the square in front of the army truck. The driver swerved at one of the pigs with the left front wheel but missed. With all her might, Sally pushed Bennett before her through the lavender door, and the storekeeper slammed it behind them.
After a minute, the man opened the door a crack and peered out. “It’s all right, they didn’t see you.”
“What’s he saying?” Bennett asked.
“The soldiers didn’t see us,” she told him. She switched to Spanish. “What will they do to those people?”
The man shook his head sadly. “Those were very foolish people.”
“What did they do?”
“They made fun of the army,” the man said, in an awed tone of voice that indicated the seriousness of this offense. “When the guerrillas came to this town two days ago, the regular soldiers ran away.”
“The guerrillas were here two days ago?”
“They left early this morning,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Those people laughed at the soldiers for running away. They said to everyone that the soldiers were not real men, that they were cowards because they were afraid to fight the guerrillas. It’s not good for you to be here with a camera. You had better leave at once. I could drive you back to San Salvador where you will be safe, for one hundred Yanqui dollars.”
“You’re crazy!” Sally said. “It cost us about three dollars each to come here by bus.”
“Seventy-five,” the man countered.
Sally thought carefully. She decided to say nothing to Bennett about the rebels having been in the town. If she did, she would never get him to go back to their San Salvador hotel today. This storekeeper was robbing them, but what the hell, money was the least of her problems.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go now.”
“Momentito. Then I show you something on the way.” He pointed to Bennett. “For his camera. It will cost you twenty-five dollars. Altogether, one hundred Yanqui dollars. If you have it.”
Sally sighed and produced a crisp bill from her purse.
The Salvadoran whistled in admiration at the unused hundred-dollar bill and slipped it behind the picture of the saint about to be beheaded. Then he looked through the doorway out into the blazing light of the square and beckoned them.
“What’s happening?” Bennett asked.
But Sally was already out the door.
They moved at high speed along the road in a battered green 1970 Buick Skylark with no muffler, which made the car sound like a powerboat. A few miles down the road, without easing his speed, the Salvadoran swung off the road into a set of the tracks across the dust, and the car fishtailed and skidded sideways to a halt. The driver smiled and took off again from a standing start that spun his rear wheels in the dirt before they found traction and rocketed the car forward.
“Great old V-eight,” Bennett said with approval. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
Sally was frightened that if she translated this for the Salvadoran, he would be encouraged to show off more of the jalopy’s prowess. She pressed her hands against the dashboard, figuring that two broken arms were preferable to a face disfigured by a splintered windshield.
Round the base of a small hill, they came to the town’s garbage dump. The set of tire tracks swerved into the garbage.
“It looks worse than it smells,” the Salvadoran said, gesturing expansively at the refuse on both sides of the car. “The sun dries it out after the birds and animals pick over it. The vultures are slow today. Usually they’re the first ones here.”
He looked around carefully as he drove very slowly, and then pointed to some bright patches ahead that stood out from the camo
uflage of weathered garbage. He put his foot on the gas and then on the be as they neared the place. He stopped and switched off the engine, gesturing out his open side window and watching her face closely.
They were the same ones. The two men in their early twenties; the woman still holding her baby; the toddler now about ten feet away from her, one knee bent, lying on his back; the boy; the girl; the old woman… they all lay on their backs in the sunshine with bright red blotches on their bodies. Their arms and legs were at odd angles. Their mouths and eyes were open.
Bennett had stuck his camera out the rear side window and was filming them. Sally forgot to turn on the mike, which didn’t matter because the only sound to be heard was flies buzzing.
Mike Campbell looked at the sun rise yellow through the blowing sand that beat like rain against the pickup’s steel side and roof. He bit on grains between his teeth and tried to lick them off onto the back of his hand. The wind howled, and a lone cactus raised its claw at the sky.
He had pulled the pickup off a ruler-straight road that ran from one horizon of Arizona to the other. On the windward side of the road, the sand had encroached halfway across the traffic lane. Mike had been waiting for daylight before leaving the road, because headlights made everything look deceptive and unfamiliar off a paved surface. The desert could be tricky enough to cross at the best of times.
He switched on the engine, shifted into four-wheel drive and started out across the and waste. A tall, lean man in his late thirties or early forties, his calm gray eyes contrasted with his restless manner. He had a deep tan, his face was heavily lined, and he had small sharp scars on his neck and arms. Some of them shrapnel. He fixed on a notch in a distant blue mountain range as his marker. After some miles, the dead-flat land began to undulate in small rises and dips; and pockets of soft sand caused the pickup to slew and spin its tires.
The sun climbed in the sky, and the beams of heat from its merciless golden eye would miss nothing later in the day. But now there was still a chill from the desert night lingering in the air. Mike hoped to make it to the first of the canyons before the heat grew uncomfortable. He had discovered the network of canyons by chance when some powerful thermals took his glider over backcountry that fliers normally avoided because of its remoteness. From the air, he had seen the canyons running into one another like cracks in dried mud, till they ended in the river. What most intrigued Mike about them was that he had not known they were there.