by J. B. Hadley
He peeled the shirt from her shoulders. She was not wearing a bra. He stroked her breasts and fondled her nipples, and in spite of herself she felt them grow erect.
“I’ll scream,” she threatened.
“If you do, I’ll have to gag you, Sally. Remember last time, how you nearly choked.”
She protested only weakly as he pulled first her fatigues and then her panties off her legs.
“But not him.” She pointed at Manuel.
She was bargaining now.
“Manuel is a revolutionary, Sally. He deserves everyone’s gratitude. And he’s my friend.”
He pulled her to her feet and made her stand there naked, facing him.
Manuel came behind her, unzipping his pants.
Paulo caught her by the shoulders and forced her to bend over.
“No, no, not like that!” she whimpered as Manuel forced himself into her from behind.
Esteban unzipped himself and pushed her upright again. He entered her brutally. The two men pounded into her, and she sobbed and pleaded with them to stop hurting her, her voice half-stifled as she was pressed between their bodies.
Chapter 15
THE worst heat of the day had passed by the time Mike Campbell and the team got to the area where they believed the Salvadoran training camp to be. Except there was no sign of it in the forested valley where it was supposed to be.
“This map is not in high detail,” Mike said, pointing to the chart the Cuban had marked for him and comparing it to a more highly detailed military chart. “It could be this next valley over.”
“Or the Cuban could have been lying,” Lance commented.
Mike smiled. “I’ve noticed you think people lie under pressure, Lance, even when they’re bargaining for their lives. But I tell you that when you have someone with his back to the wall and he suddenly sounds as if he’s started to tell the truth, you can usually rely on it. I’ve been fooled by some good liars in my time, but never by a guy sweating out what he thinks may be his last hour on earth. A lot of men choose the path of virtue when they see that truth can buy their freedom and another lie can hang them. They take no more chances. Let’s look at that next valley before we mouth off our worries.”
They moved out, and Bob Murphy said to Lance, “Mike had to put you down that time. He’s telling you something he’s learned himself. See how he didn’t get all wound up when things weren’t where they’re supposed to be. That’s what makes him a top man to lead a mission. He doesn’t expect things to work out easy. He even gets suspicious when things work out like they’re supposed to. Even now, if that camp isn’t in the next valley, I bet he has two or three more plans swimming around in his head.”
The Aussie was giving Mike more credit than he deserved. Mike had slapped Lance down—as he would any man who made negative, defeatist comments as a matter of habit during a mission without backing them up with constructive alternatives. Mike had no other plans if they could not locate this camp, and he didn’t need a rookie like Lance to remind him they were invading Nicaragua on the word of a Cuban communist.
The training camp was in the next valley, halfway up the side of the far slope. The sun had begun to set and the light wasn’t great; but through his binoculars Mike made out more than a hundred figures moving about inside the compound, and sentries on the perimeter, but no wire or guardhouses.
He handed the binoculars to Lance. “Keep watching. See if they come and go any old way or if they avoid certain areas that might be mine fields.”
Mike’s left arm throbbed painfully. Andre had cleaned and dressed the wound, which was an angry red furrow channeled out of his flesh by the militiaman’s bullet. The wound did not interfere with his arm movements; and so long as it did not become badly infected, it would heal into just another memento on his body of battles past and almost forgotten.
They ate C rations, and were ready to move down into the valley at dusk. Mike figured it would take them about an hour to walk to the camp’s location, so he left just about that much dying light to make the trip. He wanted to arrive at the camp in darkness. From all they could learn, the compound seemed nothing more than a collection of wood huts in a forest clearing. There were no fortifications, no attempt had been made to conceal the camp from the air, and people down there seemed to wander in and out at will. But there were guards. Presumably there would be an arsenal. And it had more than a hundred occupants, men and women. The mercs could learn nothing more from this distance and in the fading daylight.
Mike briefed them on his general plan: “We go down unseen, spot the girl in the camp, take her with minimum fuss, march through the night toward the Honduran border and cross at dawn. Okay?”
None of them were so simpleminded as to believe things would actually happen this way. But not even Lance said anything. After all, Mike had told him earlier that the training camp would be in the next valley, and it was. Even he could not argue with success.
They became lost for a while on the way down the valley and up its other side, and finally got their direction right by the numerous oil lamps being lit in the camp itself. The looming shapes of the trees against the lighter sky made it reasonably easy for them to find their way through the woods in the gathering darkness. Occasionally a thorn bush made itself known to one of the team, and the rest were warned off by the whispered curses of its discoverer as he freed his legs from it.
“They don’t seem to have a generator,” Mike said. “Each of these oil lamps illuminates only a very small area, which will be good for us. We should be able to see Sally easily enough if she walks close to any of the lamps. One bad thing may be that with only lamps for illumination, they probably turn in very early—so we don’t have much time to find her tonight. No more talk from now on. No cigarettes or lights. And try to walk more quietly—they don’t have nocturnal forest elephants in Central America.”
They did the best they could, but in the darkness it was impossible to move silently through undergrowth and over dead branches.
A voice called out to them in Spanish: “Who’s there?” Mike nudged Cesar, the only native Spanish speaker, to reply.
“We’re the new training unit,” Cesar called back in a broad Cuban accent. “Our truck broke down and we got lost trying to take a shortcut.”
This explanation was greeted by laughter, then the reply, “And you’ve come to train us!”
As footsteps approached, they all ducked down and hoped they wouldn’t be seen. Cesar walked toward the man and they shook hands.
“Where are the others?” the Salvadoran sentry asked.
“Roberto,” Cesar called, and Bob Murphy lumbered up to the Salvadoran.
When the sentry put out his hand, Bob grabbed it, pulled him forward off balance, and chopped him twice with the side of his right hand. The others heard a bone snap and a sigh of expelled air. They left the crumpled sentry on the forest floor behind them.
“You can’t expect all of them to be that dumb,” Mike whispered warningly.
By now it was pitch-dark. The camp, with scores of lighted oil lamps swinging to and fro in the slight breeze in the otherwise dark valley, looked a little like a large ship on a night sea. They made their way slowly and as quietly as they could, climbing to the slope directly above the camp.
When Joe Nolan walked nose-first into a gun muzzle, he knew it was a Kalashnikov by the full hood over the front sight. From about ten paces to the right, a flashlight flickered on his face for an instant. Then all was dark again. The muzzle of the assault rifle was now pressed in earnest just below his right eye. Joe Nolan was no Cuban, Salvadoran or Nicaraguan—that much anyone could tell, even in a momentary flashlight beam.
Joe couldn’t speak Spanish, but even if he did, he could not for the life of him think of something plausible to say.
It was Cesar Ordonez who spoke, from the darkness behind Joe. “Very good, compañeros. I had sworn we would be able to infiltrate among you without being noticed—from what I saw of the
camp awhile back. It looked like a very loosely run place. You surprised me, I admit that. I am one of your new Cuban instructors. This norteamericano speaks no Spanish. He is an explosives expert and is one of us.”
The gun barrel did not budge from Nolan’s cheekbone.
“Being cautious, eh?” Cesar went on in Spanish in his strongest Cuban accent. “You have a right to be. We cannot be too vigilant for the revolution, no? Well, I have my papers here and other documents.” Cesar fluttered them in the dark.
Campbell smiled grimly at Cesar’s ploy to get the second man with the flashlight to reveal his exact where-abouts and to take his hand off his trigger to operate the flashlight.
It worked.
The flashlight beam sprang out at the papers in Cesar’s left hand, and the muzzle of the Kalashnikov was with—drawn a few inches.
That was all Joe Nolan needed. He knocked aside the rifle barrel with his right hand, which gripped a U.S. Marine Corps combat knife. Nolan could see the man’s face by flashlight, and he drove the knuckles of his left fist into the man’s mouth and hung onto his lower jaw, with his fingers between his teeth, to keep him quiet. On Nolan’s first thrust with the combat knife, the Salvadoran dropped the Kalashnikov unfired. He tried to fend off Nolan with his arms and fists, but, in a frenzy, the merc stabbed at everything that came his way, severing two of the man’s fingers before finishing him off with blind thrusts to the body.
Nolan’s left hand was bitten across the knuckles from the man’s upper teeth, and on the palm from the lower teeth. But at least the guy died without making a sound, and that was what counted now.
As Harvey Waller saw Joe brush aside the Salvadoran’s rifle muzzle from his face, he went for the one with the flashlight. Harvey had been using a stave, twice as long and twice as thick as a baseball bat, to feel his way in the dark. He brought the stave down with all his strength and poleaxed the Salvadoran who had the light. He kept thumping the man’s body with the length of timber, raising the stave high above his head and bringing it down in mighty strokes that made a sound as if they were hitting a wet burlap bag. As the others moved out, before joining them Harvey took his time about enjoying one last tremendous whack with the stave.
Campbell looked through the Star-Tron night-vision system at the camp beneath them. The optical device consisted of a hand-held tube, which could also be mounted like a telescopic sight on a weapon, with a cameralike lens on one end and a binocular-style eyepiece at the other. The lens focused all the available light onto an intensifier tube, and the tube amplified the light to give an image with maximum contrast. The device could work at levels that seemed pitch-dark to the unaided eye, utilizing starlight and other forms of illumination available at night. All the oil lamps made it child’s play for the device, and Mike could plainly see the features of the people in the camp beneath him, even of those outside the pools of light made by the lamps. He watched in vain for a blonde. It occurred to Mike that Sally’s hair might have been dyed black by this time in order to make her less noticeable. He remembered her features from the photos he had studied, and no woman he had seen so far looked even remotely like her. Mike took the Star-Tron from his eye.
“That near bunkhouse is for women only,” he whispered to the others. “That’s where she’s got to be. Bob and Lance, sneak down behind the farthest of the four men’s bunkhouses, steal a few oil lamps, pour the fuel on the back wall of that farthest bunkhouse, light it and get back here fast as you can without being seen. I’m betting on all the women in their bunkhouse rushing out to help quench the fire, except Sally. She must be disillusioned by now, unless she’s gone totally commie. Who knows? Main thing is, Lance and Bob, make it look like an accident. Chuck away the lamps so that no one will know right away what started the fire. That will give us a little extra time to get away if all goes well; and it won’t blow everything if things don’t work out right away. Any questions? No? Okay then, good luck.”
Murphy and Hardwick crept stealthily into the dark. It never ceased to surprise Mike how silently Murphy’s bulky body could move.
Campbell handed the Star-Tron to Andre Verdoux. “You take charge while Cesar and I go to the women’s bunkhouse. Keep scanning the compound. If you see Sally somewhere else and think she can be grabbed, send Joe and Harvey after her. We all rendezvous here with you. Watch your back for roving sentries.”
Mike stayed where he was for the moment, and in a little while they saw a wide orange tongue of flame lick up the back wall of the farthest bunkhouse. The wooden buildings in the clearing were military style—built of plywood and two-by-fours, with pitch-coated roofs—rather than being peasant-style structures of bamboo with banana—leaf thatch. But the wall burned just as well. Except that nobody noticed it.
They heard muffled shouts from inside the burning bunkhouse. The flames had by now taken hold on one corner of the tarred roof, as well as having spread along the back wall. Men emerged from the bunkhouse door. They shouted. Others gathered. They started running back and forth.
Mike held Cesar back. “Give ’em time.”
The flames on the roof far outshone the feeble lanterns, and they could see large numbers of men and women passing buckets, basins and cans and throwing water on the flames.
Bob and Lance returned and gave the thumbs-up to Mike and Cesar as they moved out.
The women’s bunkhouse had emptied as Mike had predicted. Using the Star-Tron, Andre had not been able to spot Sally anywhere in the moving throngs, and Mike considered that no one had a sharper eye for ladies than Andre.
This end of the camp seemed deserted, but Mike and Cesar proceeded warily. A fire like this would be a tipoff to a really experienced man that the rest of the camp was worth keeping tabs on. Mike considered that the really amazing thing about obvious diversions was how often they worked.
Mike held up a hand, and Cesar stopped. He had seen something. Just a slight movement up ahead. In the darkness next to one of the small wood huts. Mike had seen only a shadow. Maybe only a flicker caused by an oil lamp. Maybe nothing.… Then, by the light of the distant flames, both he and Cesar saw a man come toward them. He had an automatic rifle slung on his right shoulder and was padding around watchfully. This was one man who had not been fooled by the fire. He hadn’t seen them yet. Maybe he just sensed something.…
He stood at the corner of an unlit hut. Silent. They could hear the shouts of the firefighters, and every now and then they could see the face of their adversary in an orange glow of flame.
An oil lamp was suddenly hung outside a hut not far away, and they heard footsteps running in the direction of the blaze. The man scowled at the light for illuminating his position and temporarily spoiling his night vision.
Mike held an eight-pointed throwing star before his face by its central disk. He flicked it backhand so the points rotated rapidly from top to bottom as it whirled through the air toward the lone man’s head.
The star embedded itself in his temple above his left eye, with a sound like splitting wood.
Mike and Cesar rushed to the women’s bunkhouse. It was empty. They wandered out again, at a loss what to do next.
About a hundred yards off, a door of a lighted hut swung open and a man came out, buckling his belt.
“It’s a fire!” he yelled back into the hut through the open door. “A bunkhouse is on fire!”
“He’s Cuban,” Cesar hissed.
A big burly man came to the lighted doorway and looked across the compound at the flames. Then he turned his head to speak to someone inside the hut, and they could see his face.
“Paulo Esteban!” Cesar practically exploded.
Mike had to hold him forcibly back. “Are you sure?” he whispered.
“I’ve seen fifty photos of that bastard,” Cesar whispered back. “It’s him!”
“Let him go.” Mike dug his fingers hard into Cesar’s shoulder, and when that didn’t work, Mike nudged him in the ribs with the muzzle of his Uzi. “First we find the girl.”
Cesar was reluctant to hold back, but he knew he was up against Mad Mike and that crossing him now would be a very risky bet. So Cesar controlled himself. Though the likes of Esteban was what he had come for. Not for money, and certainly not for the fool girl.
The two Cubans ran past them on their way to the fire.
“Keep watch,” Mike said and ran toward the hut.
Uzi ready, he cautiously peered into the open doorway of the lighted hut. A very sad looking, very pretty blond girl sat naked on the edge of a camp bed. She looked at him, frightened.
Mike said, “Sally Poynings, I presume.”
Chapter 16
“HOLY shit!” Lance said. “I don’t believe what my eyes are seeing!”
Lance Hardwick’s eyes were seeing a naked blonde running hand in hand by lamplight with Mike Campbell across the compound, as if they were gamboling in some nudist movie—only, of course, Mike had on his fatigues and boots and guns, which kind of spoiled the effect or maybe increased it. Anyway, Lance decided, it looked weird.
Mike and the girl disappeared out of the lighted area, and soon after Lance heard them approach. He could feel her naked presence close by and wondered what she would do if he reached out and touched her warm skin.
“Here are your clothes and sneakers,” Mike said to her. “Get them on quick. Andre, you take her and everyone else back the way we came. I have some business here.”
Mike spoke in a rapid, impersonal voice, signifying he wanted no arguments. That didn’t impress Bob Murphy.
“Where’s Cesar?” Bob asked.
“He found some Cubans in the camp, deserted us and went after them,” Mike said matter-of-factly. “He was with me, so it’s my job to go get him back. Now move out.” He pulled out his compass and waited for Andre to do the same. They consulted the luminous dials. “Take a bearing north-northeast and stay with it as best you can. If I don’t catch up with you, Andre, keep going. Cross that border by dawn.”