The Viper Squad

by J. B. Hadley

  “Nobody here wants to harm me. The soldiers are my friends.”

  “It seems to me you’re playing a dangerous game,” Rosita commented.

  “And you?” he challenged.

  She laughed. “I do it for money. Here is the name and hotel in San Salvador of my norteamericano. He says the rebels should contact him there so they can talk.”

  “That will cost him a hundred Yanqui dollars.”

  Rosita raised her eyebrows in appreciation and said to Chips in English, “He say he want one hundred Yanqui dollar.”

  “A hundred dollars!” Chips rooted in his pocket. “Here, give him this twenty.”

  The shopkeeper held up a hand and shook his head. “Fifty,” Chips offered.

  “Cincuenta,” Rosita translated.

  “Ciento,” the man responded.

  Rosita began in English, “He say—”

  “I know, I know.” Chips peeled off another four twenties from a wad, added them to the fifth bill and handed them to the man.

  He sensed Rosita’s eyes following the thick wad of bills from which he had peeled the five twenties, and he allowed it to float under her nose a moment to arouse her desires.

  Seven members of the Clara Elizabeth Ramirez Metropolitan Commando sat on wood boxes beneath the banana—leaf thatch of a shack in a barranca near the San Salvador football stadium. They were secure here with the poor as their watchdogs. A lone policeman or soldier would meet a bullet or steel blade within minutes in this barranca, and the arrival of an armed force would raise an alarm a mile around them. And this was not a place where strangers chose to wander and spy. Not if they wanted to live to see another day.

  “We have to wait for Paulo for orders on what to do,” an intense young man argued. “He knows the whole story. We don’t.”

  There was much grumbling about this.

  “These Cubans think they are better than us,” another said. “We always have to wait for Paulo or one of the other Cubans to tell us what to do. I say we take action for ourselves.”

  “What action do we take? No one in El Salvador knows what’s going on, rightist or leftist. At least the Cubans and Nicaraguans have outside contacts and access to hard information.”

  “They feed us what they want us to believe,” the first shot back, “and leave out anything that doesn’t suit their purposes. You ask what we should do. I’ll tell you. Let’s find out what this Chips Stadnick has to say. What harm can that do?”

  “Sounds reasonable,” another concurred.

  “We’ll wait for Paulo because we’re under orders to wait for him. I don’t like Paulo Esteban any more than you do, but as members of this commando we obey orders, not give them.”

  “I want to hear some reasons this time,” another grumbled, but they all stayed where they were.

  After a while, two young boys ran into the shack. “He’s coming!”

  “Good. Make sure he was not followed.”

  The kids ran away again.

  Paulo Esteban had a big head on a broad pair of shoulders, and his large, thin-lipped mouth gave his face a serious judgmental look that went well with his piercing eyes. Fidel Castro was supposed to have said of him that he was a perfect blend of brains and brawn. Paulo sensed his lack of welcome among the seven members of the commando. They had to be made to realize that the revolution had no time for their feelings.

  “We have to make up our minds how to deal with the norteamericano Stadnick.”

  Paulo gazed at the man who had made this statement. So they were going to show him their independence by making it sound as if they were calling the shots. He could go along with that. He took his time in pulling up a crate before he sat on it.

  “Some of us think we should find out what it is this Stadnick has to offer. He says he works for Poynings.”

  Paulo nodded. “So he says.”

  “You think he’s CIA?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Paulo raised a big hand. “Maybe he does work for Poynings.”

  “Then we talk with him?”

  “Why?” Paulo asked.

  “To find out what he’s here for!”

  “I could tell you that,” Paulo said. “He’s here to finger you for the police and the army.”

  “How do you know, cubano?”

  Paulo ignored the unfriendliness. “You heard that the Nicaraguans contacted Poynings in Boston for you? They’ll convey all your demands to him up there. So what’s this Senor Stadnick doing down here? You trust him more than you trust our Nicaraguan friends? You want to talk with this gringo?”

  Paulo was pleased to hear a respectful silence.

  He went on, “Even if this Stadnick has been sent here by Poynings to make an offer to you, why would you think it was genuine if Poynings had to go behind the backs of the Nicaraguans to do it?”

  Another silence.

  Paulo now spoke in a rapid, toneless, matter-of-fact voice. “The members of the Revolutionary Committee for San Salvador Province have decided not to deal with this Senor Stadnick. They recommend making this clear to the people who sent him as an emissary here.” He paused and looked at them one by one. “I’ll leave it up to you, my friends, how best to make it clear.”

  Chips Stadnick left the Sheraton, in the western out—skirts of the city, and caught a taxi on Colonia Escalon back to the Metrocenter business and shopping complex where his hotel, the Camino Real, was located. He left the taxi on Boulevard de los Heroes and decided to walk around for a while in the cheerful newness of the city. There was nothing grim, dark and historical about the place at all, which was a real plus in his eyes. Chips had none of the New Englander’s veneration for musty monuments—he liked glass, aluminum and elevators that worked. He didn’t notice the small motorbike that mounted the sidewalk some distance behind him.

  The noisy little bike was hardly more than a toy, yet carried two grown men. Chips stepped to one side as he heard the scutter of the bike’s exhaust come close behind him, and he looked to make sure he was clear of its path.

  The bike stopped next to him on the sidewalk. The man on the pillion stuck a little .22 automatic in Stadnick’s face and fired five shots into his head and another four into his body as he fell to the pavement.

  Then the bike wove between a tree and a garbage can, squeezed between two parked cars and carried its two riders away into the anonymity of moving traffic.

  After a quick look at the face to see if the body was that of anyone they recognized, pedestrians hurried on about their business.

  Chapter 5

  THE snow had melted clean away in the south—western corner of Vermont; the runoff was still trick—ling from the Green Mountains; and the ground was soggy in the daytime and frozen hard at night. This was one of the few times of the year a man could find nothing much to do in this part of the world. It was too early for farming or fixing up the house, too early for trout fishing, too late for snowmobiling or hunting, too muddy for walking about, with most people a mite stir-crazy from the long, dark winter. It was the season Bob Murphy called good drinking weather.

  He pulled his Jeep into the dirt area before a clapboard house. A large sheet of plywood nailed to the front wall was clumsily lettered in red paint: TOM’S. A neon sign for Genesee beer was suspended in the window. Bob noticed that most of the cars and pickups parked outside had been eaten with rust holes caused by road salt. It had been a bitch of a winter.

  The barkeep nodded and wordlessly poured him a triple Chivas over ice.

  Bob Murphy always had to remember to keep in check his Australian high spirits and loud talk when he first walked into a Vermont bar, even in one like this where he was well known. His New England neighbors liked to greet each other with a few suspicious looks and careful nods before they got around to exchanging conversation. Like dogs sniffing each other.

  Not that anyone was going to cause trouble for Bob if they didn’t like the way he behaved. The Australian had wide shoulders, long, powerful arms and huge gnarled h
ands on a short stocky body. His straw-yellow hair was cropped short, not much longer than the several days’ growth of yellow stubble on his red face. His crooked nose and blubbery lips showed he hadn’t won all his fights—or if he had, he hadn’t won all of them easily. It surprised people, especially women, to find that his eyes were brown, soft, mild and unthreatening.

  “Been a big pool of water near four foot deep down back end of my yard near on two weeks now,” one man at the bar announced mournfully.

  “Maybe it’s catfish you should be farming instead of them fool cows,” another said.

  “With catfish, you’d get to stay abed in the morning,” a third put in “Be as good as marrying a rich woman.”

  Bob paid no heed to this jibe at him. His wife, Eunice, was from an old-money New England socialite family. Eunice would never have thought of describing herself as anything so vulgar as “a rich woman,” being of the opinion that “a woman of independent means” sounded more dignified. Bob Murphy couldn’t give a curse one way or another, which made him independent of both the rich and those that envied them, like the man at the bar who had made the remark.

  One of his wife’s friends had once remarked that Bob was the only thing in Eunice’s life she could not control. Naturally, most of her friends assumed that Bob had married her for her money, since Eunice was no beauty. Only a few realized that she and he were really happy together—the uptight daughter of old Puritan stock and the son of an outback sheep farmer proud to trace his lineage back to an Irish rebel exiled down under as a felon.

  Talk in the bar had now turned to a local drunk who had frozen to death on his own doorstep after being locked out by his wife one night a few weeks previously. Bob left the bar and took his Jeep up a side road into the mountains. He felt he needed company but didn’t want to talk. He’d go sit and watch Clem Watkins awhile if he was in his workshop. Clem was. He never had much to say to anyone, yet he was generally regarded as friendly and welcoming. If a man had something to say, Clem would listen as he went about his work. If his visitor had nothing to say, Clem still went about his work.

  Bob had ordered a hunting knife from him. Clem hadn’t started making it yet—in fact, Bob knew it might be months before he got a start on it. So he sat in his workshop and watched him cut a 9½-inch-long strip from a piece of old gang-saw steel blade, 5 inches for the knife blade and 4½ for the handle. He cut, ground and hammered on the steel while Bob thought back on his meeting with Dwight Quincy Poynings. When Bob heard that Poynings, an old family friend of Eunice’s, was coming, he was about to take off in order to avoid him.

  “Dwight wants you and your friends to rescue his daughter in El Salvador,” Eunice told him urgently.

  Bob looked at her, surprised. To Eunice, his mercenary activities belonged with his drinking, hunting, fishing—things a woman had to tolerate in a man. To her way of thinking, his combat missions with merc groups were boyish adventures in the woods. She had been to Washing—ton on peace marches while he was in the Australian army in Vietnam. She never could get it straight whom he had been fighting in the jungles of Malaysia along with the British army.

  “Bob,” she said, “Dwight needs your help. I never protest when you rush off to aid some undesirable types halfway round the world. I think that just this once you might consider helping someone close to me.”

  For anyone else, this would amount to a fairly restrained request. For ]Eunice, it was equivalent to going down on her knees and scraping the ground before him. She had been brought up not to ask things of people but to be self-sufficient in all and beholden to none. Not even her husband.

  Bob smiled and kissed her. “Certainly, my love. Of course I’ll go. But you know what I think of your friend Dwight, don’t you?”

  “Please don’t say it to him. He was quite upset the last time at that charity dinner when you called him an asshole.”

  “It stopped him talking,” Bob said. “That’s all any of us wanted.”

  Dwight came to their house, and Bob listened, along with Eunice, to his tale of woe. Then Bob phoned Mike Campbell in Arizona, only to be told he was in Switzerland with Andre Verdoux. Bob left an invitation for Mike and Andre to visit him on their way home—Tina was expecting him back in a few days, and she said he would call first. Bob added, in what he hoped was a meaningful way, that it was essential for Mike to contact him whatever he was going to do. Bob was pleased to get a call from Mike in Switzerland not many hours later accepting his invitation, and not so pleased at Andre’s acceptance also. He had not expected Andre to come, since he and Verdoux had taken an instant dislike to each other when they had first met. This dislike had not interfered with their soldiering on the mission to Vietnam, because both men were professionals and would not allow personal disputes to affect their working as a team. Bob guessed that the Frenchman scented a mission in the offing and knew that if he did not come along, he probably would be left off the team. Certainly Bob would be pleased to leave the sharp-tongued frog behind.

  Bob followed the knife-maker to his gas-fired forge in one brick-lined corner of the workshop. The steel had lost its tempering due to the cutting and smoothing. Clem started up the flames and held the handle end of the steel strip in a pair of tongs. He dipped the blade end into the flames and held it there until the steel turned blue with heat. He kept the steel in the flames till it had changed from this shade of blue to a lighter shade, then whipped it from the flames and plunged it into cold water, which boiled about the metal for a few seconds.

  “You’ll find some that will heat the steel past blue into yellow or red before they quench it,” Clem said, speaking for the first time. He fingered the newly tempered blade. “Me, I never go beyond the light blue color you saw just now. That way the steel don’t get too brittle.”

  Bob nodded.

  These were as many words as he had ever heard Clem hook up together all at one time.

  Sally looked at the rows of green tents under the cover of the forest trees.

  “They are all U.S. Army tents,” Gabriela told her. Gabriela had saved her from the rapist, who had since died, Sally had heard, from shock and loss of blood. “The Pentagon supplies us. Look, our men walk about in U.S. uniforms and boots, they carry standard-issue M16s, they eat made-in-U.S.A. rations.”

  “You captured all this from government soldiers?” Sally asked.

  Gabriela laughed. “Not exactly captured. They run away and leave it behind. Some of it we buy from them.”

  “That must make everyone in Washington very happy.”

  “I don’t think they know what goes on any more than anyone here. It’s crazy.”

  Sally was pleased to exchange her designer jeans and skimpy tank top for camouflage fatigues, and to hide her blond hair in a bush hat. However, she drew the line at wearing heavy boots and kept her running shoes. She also refused a rifle or pistol, and accepted a knife only when told she would need it to cut her food. Gabriela and she shared a tent.

  Feeling that she had gained some anonymity, if not acceptance, in her fatigues, Sally wandered about the camp alone and talked to the others. No longer looking like a tourist, she was no longer treated as one. Careful not to ask probing questions, as a reporter would, she kept her conversations polite and unintrusive. A few had Marxist-Leninist replies to the most casual observation, but most talked and behaved exactly like their fellow-countrymen did in the city of San Salvador and the villages she had been to. It made Sally wonder if some private tragedy like her own had caused each of these people to come to this rebel camp.

  They seemed in no hurry to interrogate her. First, as she had been warned, they would check the details of her story as she had told it to Antonio and repeated it to Gabriela. No one prevented her from going where she wished. No doubt, if she did not pass the interrogation, she would not live to tell anyone what she was now seeing anyway.

  “Are you a communist?” Sally asked Gabriela at one point.

  “Maybe.”

  “I suppose
that means yes.” Sally looked curiously at the serious dark-haired girl, who was about her own age. Sally decided that if they had been at high school together, Gabriela would have gone to the library while she went to cheerleading practice. “But you can’t be a real communist, with all that Stalin and Mao stuff and not letting people do what they want. Is that what you hope will happen here?”

  Gabriela looked away. “The government disappeared my father and my brother. Like they did your friend Bennett. My father was a professor at the university, and they closed that down. My brother was a student.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sally said. “Is that when you became a guerrilla?”

  “Not at first. I was too afraid. But in a while, my anger grew. Now I’m a freedom fighter.” She looked at Sally sympathetically. “That’s why I understand what you are going through now. At first you feel powerless, helpless, think there’s nothing you can do. But that changes.”

  So that’s what you aim to do, Sally thought, turn me into a guerrilla fighter. I may be dumb, but I’m not that much of a turkey.

  Poynings came to lunch the day after Mike Campbell and Andre Verdoux arrived at Bob and Eunice Murphy’s large house in Vermont. They sat at a long mahogany table with a silver service, cut-glass goblets and sprays of flowers in vases. Eunice had assumed, for no particular reason, that a formal lunch would be the best way for all of them to get reacquainted and to meet Poynings. It was a disaster. Andre complained about the sauce on the lamb. Bob called Andre an asshole. Dwight tried to make peace between the two and got insulted by both. Mike talked with Eunice, who believed him to be an avid bird-watcher or, as she said, ornithologist. Mike knew only three birds—sparrow, roadrunner and hawk, not counting seagulls—but since Eunice knew even fewer, they got along quite well.

  In spite of their seeming lack of interest and Bob’s rude interruptions, Dwight Poynings persisted till he got his story told, relating everything he knew, including the State Department’s attitude to him and also Chips Stadnick’s death, who had been described in his obituaries as a journalist. By the time coffee was served, Dwight looked gloomy and had obviously decided that things were not going to work out for him with Campbell & Co.