The Viper Squad

by J. B. Hadley

  One side of the long black barge rose on a surge of water. The barge might have righted itself again on the river had not the crane unbalanced it and caused it to tip over. The boom of the crane crashed down on the span of the bridge, crushing girders and metal supports and bringing the lot down into the water. Men fell from the ironwork like ants from tall grass.

  The three Cubans watched the distant destruction in silence, and then the sound came to them upriver seconds later, their ears still ringing from the first blast they had survived.

  Paulo Esteban ignored the mangled Salvadorans all around him, wiped the blood from his neck and nodded his head in satisfaction.

  Bob Murphy looked the Treasury Police officer in the eye. “I don’t think I’m such a tough guy. Sure I’ll talk if you torture me.”

  The officer spoke English. “It would be simpler, no, for you to tell me without the torture?”

  “I’ll tell you whatever you want to hear rather than be tortured. But first I got to find out what it is you want to hear.”

  “The truth.”

  Bob smiled patiently. “I’ve already told you that. The truth isn’t what you want to hear. We both’ know that. Me and my friends were walking down the street and some crazies on a motorbike attacked us. We fought back. You know the rest. Now that’s the truth. But that’s plainly not enough for you. Tell me what you want me to say, and if it’s not too extreme, maybe I’ll say it. Of course I’ll deny it when I get back to the States and say you tortured me. That might cost you a few million if I can get some congressmen to raise the issue.”

  The Treasury Police officer smirked. He climbed out of his chair, a bulky, stocky man like Murphy himself, stretched his arms and cracked the knuckles first in one hand and then the other. He reached for the phone on his desk, dialed a three-number extension and said a few words in rapid Spanish. He replaced the receiver and nodded to Bob.

  “You come upstairs with me.”

  Upstairs. All Bob could think was that they usually took you to the basement for torture. Easier to soundproof against your screams. But this was Treasury Police headquarters in San Salvador. An occasional scream or two in this building would probably not even be noticed. He hadn’t seen or heard of Nolan, Hardwick or Waller since they’d been separated on their arrival here. They might be dead already or dying at this very moment. For an instant he visualized their bodies hanging on meat hooks on a cinder-block wall. He followed the officer up an ornate curving staircase.

  In a narrow room with a high ceiling, Bob sat on a wooden chair. A technician attached electrodes to his skin, plugged in the wires to a machine on a steel trolley and watched a dial needle.

  “First I ask you simple questions we both know the answers to in order to see what your reactions are,” the officer told him.

  Bob had hardly been able to keep from laughing as soon as he saw the polygraph machine. He knew the simplest way to beat a lie detector every time—he had only to firmly clench his anal sphincter as each and every question was asked and answered. There wasn’t a polygraph ma—chine invented that could sort that out.

  The town of Corralitos was proud of its bus service. The two buses ran from opposite ends of the town every half hour and usually passed each other in the square. They transported chickens, small pigs and all kinds of merchandise, as well as people. Everyone knew that so long as they could hear the clatter of the buses over the rough cobble—stone streets of the town, everything was normal. People here lived in the danger zone between guerrillas and government soldiers, so that every little reassurance was noticed.

  Those waiting for the buses found areas of shade from the burning heat of early afternoon. Few people were about in this, the hottest part of the day. After the. heat peaked, people would emerge from their siestas, and the activities of the day would recommence. The buses were late. However, there was nothing very unusual about that, and those waiting either chatted or dozed in the shade.

  One of Clarinero’s assault companies filled one bus at its terminus, and the second assault company filled the other at the opposite end of town. They were waiting for the sound of the bridge explosion as their signal to start.

  “There it is,” Clarinero said with a smile, and the men in the crowded bus cheered as they heard the dull thump to the north of the town.

  Clarinero used his M16 to poke the terrified bus driver in the roll of fat about his waist. The man put the bus in gear, and they set out toward the center of town. Clarinero sat next to Sally. He smiled happily at her and squeezed her hand.

  “You promise no one’s going to get hurt?” Sally asked again.

  “I’ve already promised you that twenty times,” he said. “I want you to see what we do with your own eyes.”

  “Then why do I need this?” she asked, holding out her M16 for him to take.

  He pushed it back to her. “So that people will believe you. If you hold only a flyswatter and say you will harm no one, people will not be impressed. But if you hold an M16 and do not fire a shot, they will remember that.”

  At that moment they heard a second explosion.

  “They shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It’s much too soon.”

  “They were supposed to space out the three blasts to create a continuing diversion.”

  “They fucked up.”

  Clarinero stood in the aisle of the lurching bus, faced back and raised his hands to quiet the men. He had to shout to make himself heard above the engine and the rattling of loose panels and windows.

  They listened and were reassured.

  It all sounded crazy to Sally, but, what the hell, she was going along for the ride. She had come all this way to see something, and now, by God, she would see it.

  “Here they come,” one of the men behind them shouted.

  A green army truck came thundering toward them on the narrow street. It and the bus squeezed by each other with inches to spare and without either driver slowing so much as 1 mph. A second military truck grazed the side of the bus farther down the street.

  The guerrillas cheered the courage of their captive bus driver—who now seemed to be enjoying himself—and the stupidity of the government soldiers rushing out as reinforcements to the river bridge without noticing their enemy on the way in to take over the town in their absence. Three more army trucks passed them in the town square.

  Even Sally laughed. “I never thought that what you said would really work. I guess you must really know what you are doing!”

  Clarinero looked genuinely flattered at this compliment from her.

  They met the other bus outside the barracks on the town square.

  “Drive in,” Clarinero ordered his driver.

  The driver began to ease the front of the bus between two stone pillars, when an unarmed uniformed soldier tried to close the large wooden doors against it. The fender of the bus hit one of the doors.

  “Idiot!” the soldier howled and shook his fist at the driver. “You scraped the paint on the door. When the captain sees this, I’m going to tell him who did it, you old fool!”

  “Let us in or we’ll wreck your door,” Clarinero called.

  The soldier peered carefully into the bus for the first time, looked horrified at all the armed men inside it and took to his heels. The guerrillas laughed, and the bus drove into the enclosed courtyard of the barracks, followed by the second one.

  “No shooting!” Clarinero ordered his men as they poured from the front and rear exits to take cover.

  This was when the BBC TV camera crew arrived in two taxis. They got nice shots of the fourteen government soldiers left to guard the barracks being sent home unharmed by the guerrillas, and of course they took all the footage they could get of the pretty blond guerrilla with the M16. Her identity was later supplied to them by a Cuban contact. Clarinero seized weapons and ammunition. Before he and his men retreated from the town, they blew up the barracks and set fire to a coffee warehouse—which pleased the cameramen.

&nbs
p; As Clarinero had promised Sally, no one was hurt.

  “I’m an American, and you filthy goddam yellabellies had better not try to paw me about!” Harvey Waller looked down at the Treasury cop he had just decked.

  The man lay on the tiled floor of the windowless room into which they had locked Harvey at Treasury Police headquarters. The cop’s lower lip was split and blood trickled down his chin.

  “Get up before I boot ya in the kisser,” Harvey snarled.

  The cop jumped to his feet real quick and assumed a karate stance.

  “I couldn’t give a shit for that furrin’ nancy-boy prancin’ you go on with,” Harvey told him and belted him in the left eye.

  The policeman had raised his forearm to ward off the blow, as his training in the martial arts had taught him, but Harvey’s big hammer fist came through all the same, made an arcade game out of his brain and crumpled him in a corner of the room.

  As the cop lay there gasping and moaning, Harvey toed him in the belly, just to let him know he was getting irritated.

  “Pity I still need you in working order,” Harvey told him, “or I could really have a little fun with you. On your feet, punk.”

  The policeman climbed unsteadily to his feet, no karate stance this time.

  Harvey pointed. “You got the key to that door?”

  “No key, senor.”

  “You got a gun?”

  “No gun, senor.”

  “You telling me the truth, motherfucker? If I find one on you, I’ll tear your head off your shoulders.”

  The cop’s voice rose in anger. “If I had a gun, I would have killed you with it already!”

  Harvey grinned. “I believe you.”

  The policeman was in his early twenties, big, burly, strong, had never had his ass whipped by someone he was supposed to be interrogating. He had been put on this American after the Yank had shown signs he was not the gentle type. The young cop had swaggered into the room and tried to push Harvey around. The rest was history.

  “Come over here,” Harvey said to him.

  The Treasury cop warily obeyed, but ashamed also at being told what to do by a detainee.

  Harvey grabbed him in a stranglehold and exerted pressure. The cop began to wheeze and croak for help. The door to the room was thrown open and a tear-gas canister flung in. The door slammed shut before Harvey could get to it.

  The canister hissed gas into the room while Harvey banged on the door and offered to go quietly.

  The cop joined him and pleaded in Spanish. He got a reply from the other side of the door.

  “They say this is my punishment for letting you get the better of me. Next time I am to be more careful.”

  Harvey nodded. “You’ll be a real mean mother when you grow up, kid.”

  The door was finally opened when both were nearly blinded and asphyxiated by the tear gas.

  Harvey couldn’t see to get at them as they beat him with truncheons. When he fell, they kicked him with their heavy boots as he lay on the cool tiled floor of the corridor.

  Mike Campbell pressed the elevator button for the sixth floor. It went no higher.

  “That’s strange,” he said to Cesar Ordonez, “I was sure they said he was on the seventh floor.”

  When they got out on six, a guard with an Ingram submachine gun pointed to a steel door in a wall with a closed-circuit TV camera above it. “They’ll open it when they see you.”

  The electrically operated steel door swung inward after a few moments, and they climbed a flight of stairs to the seventh floor.

  “Mr. Murdoch will see you now,” a pretty receptionist told them with a New York Puerto Rican accent.

  Andrew Murdoch was tall, handsome and fit, every inch a Wall Street WASP with some Gary Hart-style charm. His handshake was firm, his palm dry, his teeth sparkling white. He was the first man Mike had seen wearing a business suit and tie in San Salvador.

  “I’ve been on the phone to Dwight Poynings since you called me,” he said to Mike. “Understandably, he’s a bit upset that things are not working out smoothly down here. From my short phone conversation with you earlier today, Mr. Campbell, I understand that you wish information on your missing associates. I have made it clear to Poynings that information is all I can supply. I don’t know what he told you I could do for you before you came to El Salvador. Certainly I had no knowledge he gave you my name.”

  “I understand,” Mike said. “You are simply the only American businessman he knows who is a resident here. My four missing associates and I came here to investigate a major business opportunity for Poynings. I am not free to discuss the details, as I am sure you will appreciate.”

  Murdoch nodded. “Why not go to the American embassy?”

  “That would be like phoning NBC. Poynings hates publicity.”

  “How long have they been missing?”

  “Two days.”

  Murdoch shook his head. “That’s not good. All the same, I doubt they’d murder four Americans after all the fuss that has been raised over previous American deaths. I think I can find out in a matter of hours where your friends are if they are still alive. If they are not, it will be more difficult. Care for a martini, gentlemen?”

  Obviously Andrew Murdoch’s move to the tropics had not changed his life-style in every detail. He expertly shook Bombay gin, a sprinkle of vermouth and ice.

  Cesar nodded in Murdoch’s direction and whispered to Mike, “CIA?”

  Mike shrugged.

  “I guess you fellows must think me a’ bit paranoid with the two armed guards at street level and another on the sixth floor, plus the limited access up here,” Murdoch was saying. “By the way, there are even more security precautions which are less evident. This is a dangerous country in which to be, but you wouldn’t believe how good it is for business. If Salvador’s central bank would only free up more foreign exchange, there’d be no limit to entrepreneurial opportunity here.”

  “That the only reason you’re here?” Cesar asked with a sarcastic edge to his voice.

  It was lost on Murdoch. “You bet. Sure I got to hide out up here and I can’t put the name of my company on the door. I used to have a place down the street a few years ago, a big ground-floor space with plate-glass windows, the company logo, a canopy, the lot—till the damn guerrillas threw bombs inside it. The place was a total loss. Four of my staff were killed, but I escaped with some cuts and bruises. Just lucky, I guess. Now I have to live behind high walls, and armed guards, travel to here from my home in a garkmobile—”

  “A what?” Mike asked.

  “Garkmobile. After ‘oligarchy’—members of the ruling families usually ride in Jeep Cherokee vans with or plating and bulletproof windows. They buy them in Miami and fit them out here with or at a cost of forty or fifty grand. It was a legit tax deduction for me with the IRS. They questioned it, and you should have seen the look on that IRS inspector’s face—it was at their Church Street office in New York, they haul me in every year, the bastards—you should have seen the look on his face when I claimed submachine guns and bulletproof vests and everything as a business expense. Most people who use that kind of equipment in their work don’t pay taxes!”

  Lance was terrified they’d inject him with scopolamine or some other truth serum and find out he was the one who had wasted the colonel, Turco and Adolfo. For that, he knew they’d dissect his nervous system, ganglion by ganglion, from his living and feeling tissue with no anesthetic. Or worse.

  He remembered the name of a book he had looked at by an Argentine who had run into trouble with the military dictators there, Cell Without a Number, Prisoner Without a Name. That was how he was beginning to feel already—after only two days.… And they hadn’t even beaten him yet! The electric cattle prod had yet to come.

  He was doing fine and sticking with his story of being an innocent tourist. Only now and then it would strike—the fear that they would drug him and that he would admit he had killed three of them. Not one but three of the Treasury Po
lice. He tried to imagine what they would do to him.

  Mike Campbell had decided to abort the mission and do what he could to obtain the release of the four men, even if it meant admitting why they had come to El Salvador. He was hanging on to his one last hope—Andrew Murdoch, a business friend of Poynings’ who might or might not be a U.S. government agent of some kind. If Murdoch drew a blank, Mike would waste no more time—and he realized he had wasted enough already, dragging his ass around the city searching for them every place he could think of, trying not to arouse curiosity or draw attention to himself.

  Mike jumped when the phone rang in his hotel room, and he was annoyed because Cesar grinned at his nervous reaction. Mercs don’t expect their mission leader to start nervously when a phone rings!

  It was Andrew Murdoch.

  “Campbell, I don’t know whether to tell you to run for the hills or take a limo to the presidential palace. In any case, it’s probably too late for you to do anything now. First, the good news. Your four men are all in Treasury Police custody here in the city. All four are alive and unharmed.”

  “They’re okay,” Mike told Cesar and began breathing easier. “Thanks, Murdoch, I owe you for this. What’s the bad news?”

  “Poynings has gone off his rocker.”

  “In what way?” Mike asked guardedly.

  “A British TV unit shot film of his daughter taking part in a guerrilla raid on the town of Corralitos, northeast of here, on the Rio Lempa. Apparently they flew their film or videotape overnight to London, showed it on TV there—Britain is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time—so the East Coast U.S. stations had it in time for their evening news same day, which is today.”

  Mike glanced at his watch and said into the phone, “Boston is one hour ahead of San Salvador. It’s eight here, so this happened two hours ago on the seven o’clock news?”

  “Right.” Murdoch’s voice was crisp. “All three net—works carried it. Poynings was forced to allow his own stations to carry scenes of his daughter running about with an automatic rifle. You can imagine the knot that tied him in.” Murdoch’s voice trailed off as if he were stifling a laugh.