The Viper Squad

by J. B. Hadley

  Then he wiped the wet hair out of his eyes, eased himself over the gunwale, drew the knife from the sheath on his belt and tiptoed, dripping, across the afterdeck toward the sleeping soldier. He clamped his left hand over the man’s mouth and drew the blade of his combat knife across his throat.

  The soldier drummed his heels on the deck as he struggled in Mike’s grip and as his lifeblood gushed down over his uniform. Mike released the limp body, put down his knife on the deck and grabbed the Kalashnikov. He cocked it and stood by the door of the dark cabin. He barged in suddenly, ready to spray anything that moved or made a sound in the darkness. The cabin was empty, so he came back out and helped Bob and Lance aboard. He and Lance dumped the body in the water while Bob started the marine diesel engine.

  Like many diesels, this one was a bitch to start and noisy as hell when Bob did get it going; but the diesel was easy on fuel, and Bob was of the opinion they had plenty in the tanks to last them their voyage. Some lights in the town started to come on as the engine stuttered and failed over and over again. By the time it roared to life, they could see the flashlights of men climbing into small boats to come out to the launch.

  “They probably think the soldier is drunk or loco,” Mike said.

  Lance cut the two anchor ropes and Bob swung the launch northward and parallel to the shore. The men in the small boats were shouting to them. Andre flicked on and off his beam, and the team waded out waist-deep to be helped aboard at the prow by Mike and Lance, while Bob kept the engine running and the screw turning out in the deeper water.

  When they passed the town again, heading southward, the whole place was lighted up and the men in the small boats opened up on them with automatic rifles.

  Mike sighed. “Not as quiet a start as I had hoped for, Bob. Better sail her without running lights.”

  When they were well under way, Harvey took the wheel, and Sally, who had been insisting that she be assigned duties like the others, took first watch. She noticed Mike’s bloody combat knife where he had left it on the afterdeck and fetched a plastic basin of water from the galley so she could clean it for him as she kept watch on the foredeck.

  “Next thing, you’ll be washing his socks,” Harvey sneered at her from the wheel.

  Sally was stung. “What is it with you, Harvey? I get the feeling you don’t much like women.”

  “Women are okay till they start picking up after me, dusting and washing things.”

  If any of the others had said what Harvey had said to her, she would have laughed. But Harvey’s tone of voice caused a surge of anger in her, so she ignored him, kept watch and washed the knife in the basin.

  The diesel began to develop a stutter, and after a while Harvey tied the wheel in place and went aft to tinker with the engine. Sally, sitting on the foredeck, which was also the cabin roof, saw a figure come out on the afterdeck behind Harvey. Bored with Waller’s uncouth company, she looked curiously to see which of the team it was, hoping that it might be Mike.

  Whoever it was, he stood just outside the cabin door, facing aft, a few paces from where Harvey was bent over the throbbing engine; all she could see from where she sat was the top of his head. As a joke, she reached down and grabbed him by the hair.

  He yelled with fright and twisted his head out of her grasp. He looked up at her, and she saw he was a stranger. A Nicaraguan soldier. With a machete in his right hand. He raised the blade to slash at her, then stiffened suddenly; his eyes popped and his mouth opened.

  Harvey stood behind him, supporting him with a knife buried in his right kidney. The machete dropped from the soldier’s hand, and Harvey walked him across the after—deck like a drunk being escorted by a bouncer out of a tavern, and let him fall over the side.

  After Harvey had rushed into the cabin to make sure the sleepers were all right, he returned to the wheel and said to Sally, “Not bad. You’re really getting the hang of things.”

  “Wh-where did he come from?” Sally stammered with fright.

  “Good point,” Harvey acknowledged approvingly. “We’re getting careless. That bastard probably heard Mike and the others come on board and hid in a sail locker or inside a bulkhead somewhere. Wake Mike and have him search this tub.”

  The norteamericanos had taken a battered old launch with a big diesel engine loud as a bus. Esteban smiled to himself and sat back in the captain’s chair on the bridge of the naval cutter, smoking, a cigar and watching the technicians monitor their night-navigation equipment. This time he had Mad Mike outmaneuvered.

  If Paulo had known in the first place he was up against Mad Mike Campbell, he would have done things differently. For one, he would never have delegated so much responsibility to Manuel. In hindsight, it was laughable to have sent in Manuel with those airborne assault troops to stop someone like Campbell. They mentioned that they had sent for Manuel’s dental records to see if he could be identified from the bones in the lava. Paulo was sorry to lose a loyal servant, but he could see now that the result had been a foregone conclusion. In sending Manuel, Paulo had sent a boy on a man’s errand.

  But from now on, it was going to be a different ball game. Paulo knew now whom he was contending with. The intelligence data had been radioed from Havana and decoded. Paulo was even amused by his instructions to take Mad Mike alive if possible, along with Senorita Sally, while the others were “disposable.” Paulo thought he detected in this Fidel’s curiosity to meet Mike.

  To declaw the tiger and deliver him harmless in a cage to Havana to amuse Fidel… now that was something Paulo could enjoy anticipating. He was a big man and had a hearty appetite.

  At dawn the mercs found themselves trapped by the naval cutter in a cove near San Carlos and the San Juan river. The San Juan drained the lake into the Caribbean, and about thirty miles down its length, the river became the border between Nicaragua to the north and Costa Rica to the south. Eden Pastora’s “good guy” contras were said to control the river with their speedboats armed with machine guns and explosive charges known as “piranhas.” But the mercs had no chance of slipping into the river now, trapped a few hundred yards offshore by a naval vessel that had three times their speed, plus four-inch guns and radar.

  Paulo Esteban addressed them once again over the ship’s speaker. Not only would he guarantee a safe-conduct down the San Juan for the launch and its crew in exchange for Sally Poynings and Mike Campbell, he now promised that Sally and Mike would be handed over to American authorities in Holland—after they had been presented as living evidence of United States aggression in Nicaragua at the World Court in The Hague.

  “What more could you ask for under the circumstances?” Esteban wanted to know. “Senorita Sally goes home, and all of you survive to fight again, although you do not deserve to.”

  “I don’t want to be selfish about this,” Mike said, “but if any of you think you can save your skin—”

  Andre laughed. “Anyone who believes Esteban would honor a safe—conduct for us out of Nicaragua after what we’ve done to them, take one step forward.”

  No one did.

  “Think of something, Mike,” Sally said in an adoring voice.

  They all laughed and joined in.

  “Yeah, Mike, think of something.”

  “What do you want us to do, Mike?”

  “Come on, Mike.”

  Mike held up his hands, grinning. “Don’t start getting loony. All right, listen to this. These bastards would have blown us out of the water by now if they didn’t need to take Sally alive. For some reason, it seems they want to take me alive too. But Sally is our trump card. So long as she’s with us and it looks like we can’t escape, they won’t shoot. They have to figure time is on their side. The more time we give them, the more troops they’ll be able to move in on top of us. So what do we do? If we swim for shore, they’ll blast us with their big guns. They’ll kill Sally rather than let her escape. In short, we have one obvious choice—we sail out of here and they remain behind.”

  They al
l waited while Mike went below and returned with a roll of steel cable.

  “As our nautical consultant, Bob,” Mike asked, “do you think I could wrap this around the cutter’s propeller?”

  Bob looked serious. “She probably has twin screws, Mike. You might succeed if you had me to help you. There’s masks and flippers below, but no oxygen.”

  “Let’s go,” Mike said.

  They went over the shore side of the launch and swam under it. They had to surface for air on the way to the cutter, which was difficult for them to do unseen because of the calmness and clearness of the lake water.

  Unknown to the mercs, they had been seen going over the side of the launch. Esteban shouted for frogmen. There were no frogmen on board the cutter. Then crew members. Half the crew did not know how to swim, and those who did had never dived… so they said.

  “If I find you’ve lied to me,” Esteban warned them, “I’ll have you shot. I need volunteer divers. Fast.”

  No one volunteered.

  Esteban grabbed a mask, flippers, spear gun, extra spears. He expertly went over the far side of the cutter, came beneath it and swam fast with his loaded spear gun extended before him.

  Paulo saw two divers swimming through the water. The second carried a roll of cable and hung back behind the first, hampered by his load. Paulo decided to test the spear gun on the easier target.

  The divers hadn’t seen him, so he took his time aiming, and released the spear which had no attached line to slow or deflect its flight.

  The spear gun shot slightly to the right of aim, so that Paulo harpooned the diver through one leg instead of in the trunk.

  The first diver saw immediately that the second was in trouble, swam back and raised him to the surface for air. Paulo searched for a good shot, but then was forced to surface for air himself.

  Panicked by Mike’s shouts, Sally grabbed a rusty shotgun from a cabin rack and climbed up on the foredeck. Lance and Joe had dived in the water and were swimming out to help Mike with Bob. Andre and Harvey stood on the afterdeck with their automatic rifles, scanning the water.

  Sally searched in the opposite direction. Almost beneath the prow of the launch, she saw Paulo Esteban’s head out of the water with the mask raised from his face. He took a deep breath, winked at her and replaced the mask. He dived before she could blow his head off with the shotgun. She knew she was too late, but she was in such a rage she fired anyway.

  The buckshot caught Esteban in the ass as he dived, reducing his broad posterior to a bloody pulp. He surfaced immediately, maskless, roaring with pain.

  “Sally, Sally, help me!”

  She looked away. Andre and Harvey were helping Bob aboard. She winced when she saw the spear through Bob’s leg. But Andre snapped it quickly and pulled it out.

  Sally knew her job. She ran below deck and collected bandages and disinfectant. She heard the launch’s diesel stutter and refuse to start. After a few more tries, it roared like an Indianapolis racer and they were on their way. She brought the bandages out on the afterdeck, but none of the men were paying any attention to Bob’s wound, including Bob himself. They were all looking back over the water. The crewmen lined the deck rail of the Nicaraguan cutter.

  Paulo Esteban was in the water. He was being circled by three blue-gray fins. He shouted and splashed the water and the fins veered away, then began to circle him again. He swam toward the cutter until the sharks got too close to him again, when he frightened them off by splashing. But the blood scent in the water was too strong and they came in to circle him again, moving faster now and making feints at him.

  Paulo was no more than twenty yards from the cutter by this time, and its crewmen had lowered a small boat into the water and four were shimmying down ropes into it. Others fired rifles from the deck at the circling fins.

  When one shark made a lunge at him, Paulo somehow managed to kick it away, and the three beasts resumed their rapid circling.

  Then one shark rolled on its side, and they all saw the white of its belly and the rows of teeth on its extrusible jaws as it swam just beneath the surface, seized Esteban by the middle, shook him from side to side and dived deep with its bloody burden.

  The two other sharks dived also, and the water surface was disturbed by their feeding frenzy beneath, as they tore the food from each other with their toothed maws.

  “You want to know if it’s true that I was the one who killed Paulo Esteban?” Sally said into the phone. “Sure it’s true. Though I had some help doing it.” She listened some more, then the smile faded from her face and she replied sharply, “No. I had nothing to do with Clarinero’s death. He was a good man.”

  After some more talk, she put down the phone and said to Mike, who was looking out the hotel-room window at the view of San Jose, the Costa Rican capital, “That was a call from New York. A guy from People magazine. They want to do a spread on me. They’ve been told I’m a government agent. Can you believe my father? Telling everyone that. He calls you my backup team. I hope you’re not offended.”

  “Amused,” Mike said.

  He had kind of figured that Dwight Quincy Poynings would have spent his time plotting some sort of cover-up. Which was okay with Mike. Except the less said about him and the team, the better.

  “I never told you, Sally,” he said. “Clarinero gave me a message for you. He wanted you to know that he loved you.”

  “Really?” Her eyes brimmed, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “I thought I loved him too at the time. It’s only since then I’ve realized I was deceiving myself.”

  Mike looked at her inquiringly.

  “No,” she confessed, looking him in the eyes, “I never knew what real feeling was until I met you.”

  Mike edged toward the door.

  But Sally was quicker than any leftist guerrilla, and overcame the merc before he could escape.

  The girl ran away to witness the revolution first hand, and was last seen on the evening news brandishing a captured M16 rifle while “liberating” a Salvadoran village with her comrades.

  It’s Special Forces veteran Mike Campbell’s job to bring her back alive to her rich daddy in Boston. So Mike assembles the toughest merc squadron available, arms them with state-of-the-art weaponry, and marches into the explosive Central American jungle war the whole world is watching.

  For the girl it’s a romantic romp with a dashing guerrilla leader, but for a professional like Mike Campbell, it is just another dirty war he’d better win if he hopes to live till pay day.

  War is their business…

  THE

  POINT TEAM