by J. B. Hadley
“She’s a friend,” the comandante said evenly. “I don’t turn against a friend because I can gain some advantage from it.”
“I think she’s more than a friend,” Manuel jeered.
“Are you trying to claim you’re not fucking her?” Paulo asked directly.
“None of that is your business,” Clarinero said abruptly. “I am in command here. She will not be held for ransom, and I will not hand her over to anyone else, either.”
“You’ve been told that these American mercenaries are here to capture her and that they have the support of the general,” Paulo said, trying to bring back their argument to a conversational tone. “Last evening you lost almost sixty men to them, more than a quarter of your fighting force. The girl isn’t safe with you anymore, comandante. We will take her to a more secure environment.”
“I suppose you mean Nicaragua,” the comandante sneered.
Esteban did not reply. He looked out the tent flap at the last wraiths of mist lifting from the trees in the dawn sunshine.
“I think she should be sent out aboard the supply plane,” Paulo said. “Shouldn’t be long now.”
Clarinero jumped to his feet, eyes blazing. “No!”
Up to this point it had been just an argument. The comandante could always ignore the recommendations of his Cuban advisors. They could criticize him later to the FMLN ruling body, but who cared? There would be some new crisis by then that would make this look like an unimportant side issue. And once a man had his own armed force out in the hills, he was fully answerable to no ruling body. But this was different.… Now they were threatening him.
The comandante had set up camp overnight in the trees next to the flat grassy area in the valley bottom where the ammo supply plane was scheduled to land at daybreak. It was an old American DC-3, said to have been used by Somoza to drop barrels of gasoline, after he had run out of bombs, on the Nicaraguan capital during the overthrow of his dictatorship. This prop plane suddenly turned the Cubans’ demands from an annoyance into a real threat. No one was going to take Sally from him!
The comandante calmed himself, sat down again and ran his finger down the list of needed supplies he would give the pilot for his next run. Let Esteban think he had put the matter out of his mind. He knew what he must do. When that plane landed, he would take Sally with him to meet it. The Cubans would never dare argue with him in front of his men. His men were loyal to him and would tear Esteban and Manuel apart with their bare hands if he told them to. For one wild moment, he thought of forcing the two Cubans to leave on the plane—but then he realized that this could jeopardize his future supplies from Nicaragua, which were, after all, arranged by the Cubans. He would have to live with their continuing presence in his camp, but he would keep them in their place.
“I am depressed at the loss of all those good men,” the comandante said. “But I have taken big losses before and rebuilt my strike force. It’s the waste of human life that makes me very sad.”
Esteban had his pat Marxist-Leninist explanations for all that, and he ran through some of them for the comandante. Then the three men heard the engines of the prop plane coming in for its landing—in this kind of operation, a plane wasted no time in circling. It came in and got out again without ever turning off its engines.
“We should go,” the comandante said, about to stand.
Manuel put his finger on one item in the list of supplies. “Look here.”
Clarinero looked.
Esteban caught him behind the left ear with the side of his heavy revolver, and the comandante slumped to the floor of the tent.
Esteban stepped outside the tent and called, “Sally!” He waved to her to come and stepped back inside the tent.
Manuel was emptying a bottle of ether over a face towel.
“There’s damn all we can do unless we can get a fix on their location,” Mike was explaining to Andre when a radio operator came at a run to the major’s tent.
“The planes have seen them, sir! About a hundred and fifty men moving across the next valley, but away from us. They saw the planes, and one fired a SAM-7 missile but missed by a mile. I checked with HQ and they say we have no troops in that area, sir. So it must be the guerrillas. I have the map coordinates here.”
The major marked the position of the enemy column on his field map, dismissed the radio operator and slumped dispiritedly in his camp chair.
“They’re inaccessible,” he complained.
“Crap,” Mike said. “If they can go in there, so can you.”
“What about our supply lines?”
“Fuck your supply lines. Make sure every man is carrying a three-day ration of fresh water, his rifle and lots of ammo. Those are all the supplies they’ll need, and the sooner they wipe out these guerrillas, the sooner they’ll be back here at the camp kitchen.”
“There’s going to be trouble among the men,” the major said morosely.
“Tell them that I’m just waiting to make an example of the first man who crosses me,” Mike said grimly. “Tell them I’m a pal of the general’s, and that so far as the general is concerned, I can put any one of them on a spit and cook him.”
The major nodded appreciatively. “They’ll believe that, all right.”
Campbell stopped in the shade of a massive evergreen, looked at his compass and checked the map. “I think we’re right here.” He pointed out the spot for the major. “What do you think?”
The major had no opinion. He had the unwilling, sulky look of a child being taken somewhere against his will.
“I agree,” Andre Verdoux volunteered. “There’s that range there on our left, so that if we follow this stream it will take us between these two hills and we’ll end up in that valley west of this one where Clarinero’s men were spotted. Only trouble is, they were heading north. Where will they be now?”
“I’m guessing they’ll circle back to the west,” Mike said, “and we’ll find them in this valley.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll be suspicious of the way we pulled out of town so quickly and they’ll suspect a trap,” Mike said. “Why would we just go away and leave the town almost unguarded. So they’ll hang around here until they get hard information on our whereabouts before attacking the town again. I think I’m right in saying, major, am I not, that normally your troops would have occupied that town until you had made sure the guerrillas’ main force had left the area.”
“That’s right,” the officer said shortly.
Mike had loaded nearly everyone aboard the trucks and pulled out of camp without a word as to where they were going. Andre, by this time, had borrowed a field radio and they had monitored outgoing messages to the guerrillas from their spies in the town. But this time their spies had nothing to tell them except that Chavarria’s battalion and the norteamericanos had gone somewhere.
Mike was depending on these messages being enough to halt Clarinero’s northward march. Well outside view from the town, he had ordered the trucks to pull into the hills. Then he had marched the soldiers and his mercs up and down hills and through forests until he reached where he was now. It occurred to Mike that he was going to look very foolish if Clarinero had not risen to the bait and had either kept on marching north or gone back immediately to recapture the town. But no military leader can refuse to act on his hunches for fear of looking foolish. So Mike told himself.
Two-thirds of Chavarria’s hunter battalion had been trained in Panama by U.S. Army sergeants. The battalion consisted of eighty-seven men plus seven mercs against Clarinero’s 140 or 150. What Chavarria’s side lacked in numbers, it more than made up for in training. The guerrillas would have the edge on them in dedication and desperation, which in this case were pretty much the same thing; that made Mike anxious to put the fear of God into the soldiers dealing with him. Neither side had any advantage in weapons. The comandante and his men would have the advantage in knowing the terrain; but against that, Mike and Chavarria would have the advantage of
surprise—they hoped. Chavarria’s fit of sulks suited Mike’s plans exactly, since it left him in total control.
“Ordonez, Murphy, Waller—no, you stay here, Harvey—Nolan, you three select two men apiece from our Salvadoran buddies here and move out as scouting parties,” Campbell said. “That means you don’t engage their forces, you come back to us instead. And look out for a bimbo with blond hair.”
As Ordonez, Murphy and Nolan picked their men and prepared to move forward along the stream bed, Harvey Waller resentfully asked, “Why did you change your mind about sending me?”
“Because if you had laid eyes on any of them, Harvey, you couldn’t resist the chance to blast them.”
“True enough,” Waller grunted and stopped bitching. He wasn’t going to tell Mike how he had spent weeks hunting down that commie prof in Harvard and how he had waited for just the right moment.
All three scouting parties came back several times as the battalion advanced, but each time they had nothing to report. When they had moved into the valley itself, keeping to the wooded cover of one slope, it was not long before all three scouting parties appeared almost simultaneously with news of armed guerrillas directly ahead in the scrubby evergreens. They could not approach nearer because the guerrillas had placed outlying patrols of three and four men.
Mike said, “Clarinero will stay put here till he gets a radio message on our whereabouts, and then he’ll decide how to act.”
“It could be he knows we’re here,” Andre suggested quietly, “and that he’s ready for a showdown.”
“That’s what he’ll get,” Mike said without hesitation.
Campbell gathered his team about him.
“Okay, men, let’s not forget our primary objective. We’re not here to fight rebels. We’re here to pick up a rich man’s daughter, alive and unhurt. Remember that. If anything happens to her, our mission has failed. Objective number two is to take out Comandante Clarinero. We promised the general that, but it’s only number two.”
“I came here to kill Cuban communists,” Cesar said in a sour voice.
“All right. Objective number three, help Cesar fumigate some Cuban bugs. But first, the girl. Don’t fuck up on that. Which means we can’t launch a frontal attack. Waller and Hardwick, you come with me. We’re going in to get the girl. Rest of you, stay here and keep these soldiers quiet, even if you have to strangle them to do it. If you hear shooting, drive them on ahead of you—stampede them in. Let’s go.”
A little way on, Mike stopped, and they fixed bayonets to their M16s. Then they moved cautiously forward till they saw a guerrilla patrol moving among the bushes ahead of them. The patrol had three men, and though they lay in wait for it, it veered off in another direction. A bit farther on, they heard another patrol—this time of five men, smoking and talking. Mike shook his head and they kept out of sight till the patrol had passed.
Mike held up his hand for them to stop at a narrow, well-beaten path, probably a deer trail. They hid behind some trees and waited.
They heard feet shuffling through the dry forest litter and then saw forms moving some distance away: three men, coming along the path. Lance and Harvey looked at Mike. He nodded, holding up one finger to Lance, two to Harvey and pointing three at himself. They nodded.
They scrunched down low as they could get behind the leaves of the low bushes, taking a last look at the steel bayonet at the end of the barrel but not daring to move to make sure it was still attached tightly. Each one fixed on his prey, ignoring the others.
Lance tried to control his breathing, keep it regular and easy—he felt he was gasping for breath like a fish out of water. His heart was pounding. His goddam pulse was pounding! In his left wrist. His palms were sweating. He clutched his M16, which felt greasy and slippery in his grip. His nose was running. The back of his neck itched. They were still coming along the path. His right eye was watering. He would probably fuck up, and Mike would kill him if this kamikaze guerrilla, who had probably been fighting since he was eight years old, didn’t first rip hind to bits.…
Lance Hardwick sprang up to meet the first man, who was ambling watchfully, M16 slung on his right shoulder, right hand resting on the weapon. Holding his rifle sideways, Lance delivered an upward thrust of the flattened bayonet blade to the man’s midriff, so that the steel slipped easily through the ribs, like a knife between the slats of a venetian blind.
Lance felt him struggle, skewered on the bayonet, a bit like a big fish tugging on a fishing rod. Then the contorted, writhing body slipped in its agony off the blade and curled up on the ground, making horrible groaning noises, with blood streaming out of the wound onto the man’s wrists and over his bare arms.
Lance vomited.
Harvey Waller did things in style. He hit the second man with the tip of the bayonet a few inches above his pecker, drove the blade in and lifted up, raising the guerrilla off the ground like an oldtime farmer pitching hay. The bayonet cut up through the man’s belly, and his entrails spilled out. Harvey set him back on his feet and jerked the blade from his body. The rebel staggered about on the path, trying with both hands to keep his innards from falling out, not succeeding, and stepping and slipping on his own guts and looking down in anguished horror at his empty, eviscerated body cavity and at the throbbing tubes and entrails on the forest floor. He fell facedown in his own digestive tracts and did not move again.
Harvey looked pleased with himself.
Mike Campbell held his bayonet point to the neck of the third man. The guerilla looked back at Mike with pride and hatred in his eyes, and did not flinch at the death of the first man. It was Harvey’s disemboweling of the second man that broke him. By the time that was over, his hands and legs were trembling so badly he could not have used his rifle even if he had not had a length of sharpened steel at his throat. A smell of shit wafted through the air, and then he also pissed in his pants, leaking out over his combat boots.
Mike nudged him with the bayonet in his Adam’s apple. He said in Spanish, “You have a wife and children?”
“Si.”
“You want to see them again?”
“Si.”
“You know who we are?”
“The norteamericanos come to kidnap Sally Poynings.”
“Is she here?”
“She left by plane at daybreak.”
Lance spoke in English. “The bastard is lying, Mike.”
“Maybe,” Mike answered him, then said in Spanish to the guerilla, “Where is Comandante Clarinero?”
The guerilla looked at Mike with fear-distended eyes, his chin raised high by the pressure of the bayonet tip. “Directly ahead of you, about eight hundred meters.”
“Do you have Cubans here?”
“Two. Paulo and Manuel. They left with the girl.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“Inez.”
“I’m going to take a chance on you,” Mike told him, removing the bayonet from his neck. “You got government troops that way. You got Clarinero that way.”
“I go this way,” the rebel said, pointing up one valley slope, “and may God bless you, senor.”
“My regards to Inez.”
The man shucked off his rifle and ammo belt and ran up the hill so fast that even Harvey Waller half-smiled as he said to Mike, “If I risked letting a man go like that, you’d curse me out for being a weak-brained pansy.”
Mike laughed. “No fear of you ever letting mercy lead you astray, Hey.”
As the mortar crews dug into the ground with shovels and set the baseplate, Campbell went from crew to crew, checking on their work. He found fault with them all. The square, flat, pressed-steel baseplate of the M2 light mortar had a toothed spade under its rear edge that, if sunk properly, took a firm bite into the ground and anchored the firing tube.
“You’re going to be ruing over our heads as we attack,” Mike yelled at one crew in Spanish. “You expect me
to do that while you fire with a loose baseplate? You have no accuracy when a mortar has a loose baseplate. You could bring your shells down on my head. And you assholes better make sure you kill me, because any of you that scores a near miss on me is going to wish he had been stillborn.”
The mortar crews went back to work to get their weapons set up properly. Each crew got the baseplate level and immovable in the earth and set up the short, smooth—bore tube and its bipod with single-spike collars. They hand-cranked the elevating gear. Mike reckoned the comandante’s main position was fourteen hundred meters away, which was well within the 1850-meter range of the M2. One man stood by each tube, ready to muzzle-load the 60 mm high-explosive shells.
When Mike was satisfied, he nodded to Major Chavarria to give the order for his men to advance. The major himself stayed behind to supervise the mortar crews.
As the mercs moved forward through the forest with the Salvadoran regular soldiers, Mike gave his team their instructions. “This country’s civil war is not our business. Our business is to find that damn girl. Clarinero knows where she is, which means we have to find Clarinero.”
The mortars opened up behind them, and the shells whistled over their heads and exploded in the forest ahead of them.
Between the explosions, Mike shouted in Spanish, “When the barrage stops, go in fast. Overrun them.”
The soldiers looked less than enthusiastic about this idea. Mike had been pushing them around since dawn, force-marching them in the hills, and now he was pushing them into contact with the enemy—something they liked to avoid as much as possible. But they dared not stand up to him, because they were afraid of him and the mercs. Also, they knew he was a friend of the general. That meant he could do anything to them and get away with it. Fighting the guerrillas would be the easier way out—but they didn’t have to look happy about it.
The mortar barrage stopped, and the officers and sergeants urged the men forward.