The Viper Squad

by J. B. Hadley

  Sally had a cold foreboding about the place. An overall view of the city could be had from the surrounding hills, called Los Planes de Renderos. She drove to the highest peak in Balboa Park. There was a space for cars at an overlook on the top.

  “They shoot them here,” Alicia said, standing at the edge, “and the bodies tumble down.”

  The city lay spread out beneath them in a shroud of smog. Sally looked down the steep slope of angular rocks on which grew clumps of ferns and mountain plants. “We have to climb down to see?”

  Alicia nodded. “Follow me.”

  Sally tried not to look down at the huge drop below her. It was not a sheer drop; and if she had slipped, she would have fallen fifty feet at the most. The two women climbed down slowly, and Sally carefully followed Alicia’s directions about footholds, handholds and slippery places.

  Alicia pointed. There were some white rib bones and arm or leg bones—Sally did not know which—along with two human skulls. One skull had a bullet hole above the right eye socket.

  When they found him, Sally knew it was Bennett right away from his shirt and pants, before Alicia pulled the body over to see the face. A cross was slashed on his forehead, and one on each cheek. He had been shot through the left ear.

  Chapter 3

  THE same pool of green water gave off the same bad smell in the village square when Sally got off the bus from the city. The beggar was not on the church steps and there was no sign of the two small pigs by the roots of the withered trees in the center of the square. Otherwise the place was the same as when she and Bennett had arrived the morning before. She even recognized some of the children in tattered clothing. They all seemed to know her.

  “Buenas dias, senora!”

  She smiled at them.

  Sally felt the loss of Bennett deeply as she repeated their actions of the previous day, this time without him. She went to the cinder-block hut with the Coca-Cola sign and pushed open the door with the flaking lavender paint. The middle—aged man sat behind his counter by the dim light of the tiny window high in the wall. Sally wondered if he sat like this all day. The soccer player on the calendar still had not kicked the ball and the maharajah still had not beheaded the saint in the holy picture. But Bennett was gone. Forever.

  “Senor, I want you to take me to the guerrillas.”

  He flinched as if she had thrown scalding water on him. Then he spoke very carefully. “The guerrillas have gone. Up into the mountains.”

  “I’ll pay,” she offered.

  “Where is the senor?”

  “Dead.”

  “I’m sorry. Was he disappeared?”

  “Yes, they disappeared him,” she said, using the verb common in El Salvador, “but we found his body.”

  “The situation …” He shook his head.

  That was what everybody in El Salvador called their civil war, “the situation.”

  Sally wondered for the first time if Bennett had been murdered at least in part for what had taken place in this village, and whether this man might have informed on them. Up till now she had blamed his death entirely on the Bermudez incident. She looked closely at the shopkeeper and thought it very possible he had informed on them. Yet she could feel no animosity toward him. She and Bennett had intruded on his life. Then again, the way he had been startled by her mention of the guerrillas indicated to her he was in some way connected to them or at least in sympathy with them. But would that be enough to prevent his informing on them to the army? For his own safety? After all, she and Bennett were just foreigners. Yet it was this man who had shown them the bodies, given Bennett his chance to make his film of them. Had someone else in the village informed? Or was it connected solely with Bennett’s filming of the attack on Bermudez? She would never know and she was too weary to care. If this man was an army informer, she’d give him something to tell them this time.

  Sally realized she had been standing there staring wordlessly at the shopkeeper. She hastily pulled a Kleenex from her purse and wiped away her tears.

  He fumbled beneath the counter and handed her a lukewarm Coke.

  “Thank you.”

  He looked at her suitcase. “You wish to stay with the guerrillas a little while?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you wish to hire me to take you to where they are?”

  “Yes.” Sally took a hundred-dollar bill from her purse and placed it on the counter between them.

  He ignored it.

  She was unsure whether he was holding out for more money or displaying his Hispanic male dignity.

  “I could take you to where the rebels are,” he said after a little while. “What if they decide you are a spy?”

  “They can check for themselves that the senor was killed by a death squad at the Puerta del Diablo.”

  “They will check, senora. If they suspect a trick, you will die.”

  “It’s no trick. I only wish it hadn’t happened.”

  “Sad, very sad.” He patted her arm. “We have become too accustomed to such things here. You must forgive us if we seem unfeeling.”

  “Everyone has been sympathetic. Even the police.”

  As they left the cinder-block hut, he slipped her hundred-dollar bill behind the holy picture and winked at her. “Don’t tell the guerrillas you gave me filthy Yanqui dollars.”

  The old Buick sped along the road for a while before turning off onto a dirt road that led into scrubby foothills that reminded her of those in Southern California. The shopkeeper drove at the same speed he had on the paved highway, despite how the car now dipped, lurched and clanked on its broken front suspension. Sally at times kept her side window rolled up to avoid choking on dust, and at other times rolled it down to avoid being baked alive in the closed-up car. The Salvadoran raised and lowered his own side window in accord with hers, a Central American male courtesy she found particularly irritating.

  His gallantry deserted him after they had gone a way into the hills. He stopped the car and turned off the engine.

  “Let it cool,” he said.

  He seemed furtive. She did not know what to expect.

  He produced a large, spotlessly clean white handkerchief from his pants pocket. After smoothing the wrinkles and folds, he tied it carefully by two corners to the top of the car’s radio aerial. He fished into his pants pocket again before slipping behind the steering wheel and pulling out rosary beads. He kissed the crucifix and wound the beads around the stem of the rearview mirror so that the crucifix dangled and swung. Then he crossed himself and turned the key in the ignition.

  The car’s progress was slow now, and he stopped every once in a while to look about or perhaps let himself be seen. Sally realized he was now so preoccupied with his own safety, he was hardly aware of her anymore except as an object to be delivered. He did not speak, and neither did she.

  He braked the car and turned off the engine in a broad valley with fields of young corn in the bottom and, on the slopes, many bushes, which she supposed were coffee, beneath taller shade trees. For the next fifteen minutes, the only things they saw move were some butterflies and a big hawk quartering the upper end of the valley.

  “Here they come now,” he said and pointed through the windshield at the side of a hill.

  At first she could make out nothing. Then she saw a man’s head and shoulders. He wore a green peaked cap and a green army shirt, and he was hardly visible as he walked through the chest-high bushes and growth. She saw another man to his left, and another and another. In all, she counted eight men walking abreast down the hill toward them, with perhaps twenty yards between each pair of men. Their movements were calm and deadly. Sally felt suddenly very much afraid.

  The shopkeeper had put her suitcase at the side of the road. He was now holding her door on for her and saying something to her.

  “You must get out, senora. Please, senora.”

  She did as he said and stood with her suitcase by the side of the road.

  The Buick made a dust-rais
ing U-turn off the road into a field and back onto the dirt road again. The driver’s mood seemed to have grown suddenly lighter, and the white flag flapped cheerfully on the radio aerial as the old can bounced away, gathering speed.

  Alone, Sally turned to face the eight men advancing toward her down the side of the empty valley.

  “I can’t carry it any farther,” Sally said petulantly and dropped her suitcase.

  Her guerrilla escort stopped and waited for their leader to speak.

  “Pick it up and come along,” he said.

  “I can’t. I’m exhausted.”

  “Maybe you should have hired servants to look after you out here,” the rebel suggested sarcastically.

  “I’d carry the damn suitcase if I could,” she snapped. “I’m not physically strong enough.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have brought it. You should only bring into the mountains what you can carry yourself, instead of expecting others to do your work for you.”

  “Will none of you help me?” Sally asked plaintively.

  “We’re permitted to carry only essentials and aids to the revolution.”

  She opened the case and stuffed some pairs of jeans, panties, bras, T-shirts, a sweater and sneakers into a nylon laundry bag. Her toothbrush, hairbrush and a few other items completed the bundle.

  “You should be able to manage that,” the guerrilla leader said patronizingly.

  “But what about all these beautiful clothes?” Sally almost sobbed as she looked at the rest of the suitcase’s contents.

  The men laughed.

  “Our women wear combat fatigues,” their leader said shortly and set out again.

  After one last regretful look at the Norma Kamalis and Ralph Laurens she was leaving behind, she followed him.

  With no further complaints, she climbed the steep slopes, stopped and kept still when told to, watched and listened like the others. It was she who heard the sound of the engine first.

  “A helicopter,” she said.

  “Down!” the leader shouted. “Everybody down!”

  They all threw themselves facedown in the long grass on the hillside. The helicopter passed a couple of hundred feet above the top of the hill they were climbing and disappeared over its far side.

  “A Huey,” one man remarked.

  “Reconnaissance,” another said.

  After they had started out again, the leader dropped back and walked with Sally for a moment before wordlessly taking her laundry bag and carrying it for her. She assumed this was a reward for her sharp hearing and prompt warning of the government helicopter’s approach. She was aware that the rebel was glancing at her curiously.

  “You came to fight?” he asked finally.

  She just looked at him as if he were crazy.

  “I’m Antonio,” he said.

  “Sally.”

  “Sa-lee,” he said a few times, getting the pronunciation worse each time. “You came here on a… sudden decision?”

  She knew he had been about to say “whim.” Obviously men down here had much the same opinion about blondes as they did farther north. She told him about Bennett.

  “Won’t the United States embassy be upset when you don’t appear as planned?”

  “I stomped off in a fury when a National Police officer suggested that his men search for a weapon at Puerta del Diablo because it looked to him like Bennett had committed suicide. Can you believe it? Slashed himself on the forehead and cheeks with a blade, then stood on top of a mountain and shot himself in the left ear! He could have done all that in front of the television set back in our room at the Sheraton.”

  “Why did he want to make contact with us?”

  “To make a fair film. He had to present both sides.”

  The rebel was silent for a minute. “But you brought no camera with you.”

  “I couldn’t make a film. I just held the microphone while Bennett did everything.”

  “So you’re not here to fight and you’re not here to make a film. What are you here for?” The question was asked gently.

  Sally did not hesitate. “What else could I do? Go home and admit it was all a tragic failure? Bennett felt we could find out the truth. I feel the least I can do is still try. I owe it to him.”

  “I don’t think you do,” Antonio said simply and walked on ahead of her again.

  The group came to a halt on top of a ridge. Sally gratefully sat on the grass. The leader dispatched six of the men in three teams of two.

  “We will go to our camp while the rest of the patrol complete their rounds,” Antonio told Sally. “Leon will come with us.”

  Sally nodded to Leon, who was a shifty-eyed, open—mouthed country boy. He did not look her in the eye and played nervously with his automatic rifle.

  The three of them passed through a narrow defile that a stream had cut through a long ridge, and emerged at the edge of a huge pine forest that stretched away to the mountain peaks in the distance.

  “Wait here with Leon,” Antonio said, handing back her laundry bag, and he disappeared into the trees.

  Sally sat wearily on the soft cushion of dead pine needles. “Is the camp far from here?”

  “Not far.”

  The tension Leon put into these two words caused Sally to look at him. He was watching her strangely.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, puzzled.

  He licked his lips. “It’s lonely for a man here in the mountains.” His eyes flicked away from meeting hers.

  Sally laughed. “Come on, Leon. You can think of a better approach than that.”

  “It’s true!” he shouted with such force and vehemence he frightened her.

  ‘Aren’t there women up here?” Sally asked, hoping to get him talking now and steer his mind onto other things. “Antonio said there were.

  Leon spat. “They’re dirt! Either they have a man already or they want none. You heard Antonio say they wear combat fatigues. And boots. And guns. Some of them are so ugly and deep-voiced, you’d swear they were men anyway—specially the ones with mustaches.”

  As she saw him hungrily eyeing her body, Sally wished she were wearing combat fatigues instead of tight designer jeans and a T-shirt.

  “You’re the first real woman I’ve been near in twelve months,” he gasped and licked his lips again. “The women here are all dried-up bitches!” He came at her, dropping his rifle and unzipping his pants. He waved his erect dick in her face as she sat in the shade of the pines.

  “I’ve seen better,” Sally remarked coolly.

  He hooked two fingers in the neck of her T-shirt beneath her chin and ripped the entire garment from her body. He hooked the same two fingers under her bra between her breasts and tore it from her, revealing her perfectly formed mounds and their pink nipples.

  Sally stared in honor as his swollen member, right before her face, exploded in a welter of blood and ruptured tissues. Her face and breasts were splattered with the gore. Leon clutched his hands to the stump of his penis and, screaming in agony, half-ran and half-danced away.

  Sally looked up to see a somber-faced young woman in combat fatigues holding a huge automatic pistol in her left hand. A curl of gray smoke rose from the gun’s muzzle.

  The woman said to Sally, “I’m one of the dried-up bitches Leon was telling you about.”

  Andre Verdoux, Mike Campbell’s buddy from the bad old days in Angola, met his plane at Zurich. The city was deep in snow.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mike said with all the wonder of a desert-dweller.

  “That’s the trouble with Switzerland,” Andre complained. “It looks like a color photo of itself. You may not think so kindly of it in twenty-four hours’ time when you’re tramping around in the snow with a pack on your back. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we climb.”

  After a day in the city of Zurich, capped by a huge gourmet dinner, they retired to their hotel rooms at ten. Andre phoned Mike’s room at three-thirty in the morning, and by four they were driving westward out of t
he city in pitch darkness and at a temperature well below freezing.

  Andre was in his mid-fifties. The older he grew, the fitter he stayed, and his constant attempts to prove he could still hack it with the toughest sometimes got on Mike’s nerves. Andre, a Frenchman, had been with their forces in Indochina and had survived the Viet Minh assault on Dienbienphu. He had been with the French in equatorial Africa and with the Belgians in the Congo. After the Portuguese abandoned Angola, he and Mike had fought with Holden Roberto’s forces against the Cuban-led leftists until the CIA abandoned Roberto. It galled them both that the American-backed anticommunists there had been forced to quit, while the anticommunists led by Jonas Savimbi in the southern part of the country—backed by South Africa—held out to the present day against the Cuban-dominated Angolans.

  Andre and Mike had been together as mercenaries on a number of missions since then. But now Mike felt it was time for Andre to hang up his guns and grow old gracefully. A man past his prime can get too many of his comrades killed with his slow reflexes or lack of drive. For Andre, this was what he had always feared. He would prefer a blade of tempered steel pushed slowly into his heart to suffering the colder steel of icy rejection for his being “too old” to go on a mission.

  Andre had persuaded Mike to take him along on a recent mission inside Vietnam. Mike had been unwilling at first, but finally gave in because of Andre’s special knowledge of the area’s languages and customs. Andre had proved himself a valuable member of that team.

  Mike guessed Andre’s invitation to him to spend a week inspecting the Swiss army in training was intended to soften his expected future resistance. Mike did not know what Andre’s status with the Swiss army was. Andre told him only that he was finishing a two-month stint as a “consultant.” When Mike agreed to go, two days later he received in the mail an “honorarium” of $5000, to cover his airfare and expenses. The check was from a Swiss merchant bank in New York City.

  Andre swept the BMW smoothly along the dark road. The snow was pushed into walls on either side of the road, and they loomed whitely in the headlights. The inside of the car was very warm. Mike was suffering from the multiple effects of the previous night’s celebration and jet lag. He fell into a deep sleep, strapped into the bucket seat.