HOYLE WOKE AS dawn rolled down from the hilltop behind the bungalow, and the lake below was like a sheet of unpolished garnet. His eyes opened, but he remained perfectly still in the bed, as was his habit. He listened to the sound of Maria breathing steadily next to him, and he was surprised when she reached out her hand and touched him. She was awake as well.
“I’m here,” he said.
He turned to face her. Maria had pulled her hair back with a rubber band, and with her face half buried in the pillow, she looked like a child. Hoyle’s head rested against his arm, and he pushed a strand of hair away from her face.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Did that really happen?”
“It did.”
“How are you?”
She looked at him, and he held her hand. “I suppose I should be used to all this sneaking around.”
“We didn’t sneak,” Hoyle offered.
“Of course we did,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I want to stay here. I want La Paz to drop off the end of the world.”
“I’ll make sure that happens.”
Maria smiled and they kissed. The light from the terrace spilled on them, and for the first time, she noticed the scar under Hoyle’s jaw. The former nurse realized that the wound had probably been life-threatening. “What happened here?” she asked, touching under his chin.
“I was shot.”
Maria did not seem surprised. “Were you in the war?”
“What war?”
“Vietnam.”
“I was in Vietnam,” Hoyle said. Vietnam and other places, but Vietnam was not a lie.
“Were you a contractor also in Vietnam?”
“I did the same kind of work.”
“Who shot you?”
“A man who killed my friend. His name was Fowler.”
“He was not Vietnamese.”
“He was an enemy.”
A moment passed, and Maria did not see in Hoyle’s eyes the burden of any sin.
“Is Hoyle your real name?”
“Yes,” he answered. “What is your real name?”
Maria pressed her lips together. They each had secrets, and since they’d made love, they had secrets together. She said evenly, “Maria is my given name. My family name is Cienfuegos.”
Hoyle held her steadily in his gaze. He had already bared his soul to her, his life, if not what he did for a living, and he knew that Maria had suspected he was a spy from almost the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.
“You are Cuban,” Hoyle said.
“I am.”
“Did Alameda help you leave Cuba?”
“No. He helps me to stay here. I left Cuba on my own. Enrique gave me papers and work.” Her eyes seemed tired, weary of the world. “He gives me a place to live, clothing, and money. I guess what we have is a pretty standard arrangement.”
“Don’t be cruel to yourself.”
“You really don’t judge me, do you?”
“No. I don’t judge you. I try not to judge anyone.”
“Very Christian.”
“I’m not a Christian,” Hoyle said. “At least not much of one. I try not to judge people because I have never done it well.”
Maria got up to bathe, and Hoyle sent out for a breakfast of coffee, Salteñas, and fruit. They were brought to the bungalow by a young man in a crisp white jacket. There were also Sunday newspapers, The New York Times and the Times of London, both exactly one week old, folded and ironed to look as though they were as new as the day. This bit of anachronism was considered part of the hotel’s charm, as Lowry always arranged to have British, American, French, and German newspapers shipped by air and driven to the lake. Even a week late, his guests appreciated news of home.
Wrapped in a robe, Maria padded to where Hoyle sat in front of the terrace doors. It was still too cold to sit on the balcony.
Maria looked out over the lake. The drive back to La Paz stood in the room with them, as real as any human interloper. It was that part of Sunday morning when the illusion collapses and the week looms ahead.
“What are we going to do now, Paul Hoyle?” she asked. “Now that we have this thing together?”
“I want to continue to see you.”
“And make love to me?”
“Yes. Can you trust me?”
“I don’t trust easily,” she said.
“You shouldn’t.”
“I don’t trust, and you don’t judge,” she said. “Do you think we can go on like that?”
Hoyle looked again at her. She was the most beautiful and mercurial woman he had ever seen in his life. He had almost forgotten that he should not be here.
“There’s no point in going on if we can’t trust each other,” Hoyle said.
“Then we will trust each other,” Maria said.
20
ON THE AERO chart, the place was called LV-36. It was an airfield mostly because the map said it was—a forlorn piece of real estate gouged out of the trees in hopes that an airplane might come. Hills stood close around it, some dappled by cloud, some washed out by the hazy sky and lolling away, one after another, each less distinct than the next. There was no tower, not even a wind sock, and the field was decidedly higher on its northern end. This made the place seem off-axis, as though it were a facet cut from a lopsided rock, a bewitched surface where nothing could be plumb, straight, or level.
It was not yet noon, and already the heat was punishing. Standing with Valdéz and Santavanes, Smith was exhausted and jangled from a twelve-hour drive from Tatarenda, north all the way to Santa Cruz and then east over a hundred miles of bad road to Vallegrande and the airfield. The drive had given him hours to think of the cable he’d sent to Langley, the details of the fight at the river, an account of Hoyle’s injury, and the particulars of the ambush. His message had been a masterpiece, for although it had acknowledged that the Bolivians had been soundly defeated, it distracted with the details of the counterattack and tantalized with the list of items recovered from the rucksack. Between every line, a jackass could read that the guerrillas controlled the countryside. This fact was easily ignored.
Defeat for the Bolivian army was routine; the contents of the rucksack were an astonishment. Smith’s cable had fallen like a bombshell in the hallways at Langley. Code breakers set to work on ciphers, handwriting experts peered though magnifying glasses, fingerprint technicians sweated over smudges, information analysts and middle managers were all put into a dither. The entire American intelligence apparatus was jolted by the possibility that the insurgency in Bolivia might be led by Che Guevara, a man the Company officially considered dead. When Langley cabled back, Smith half expected to be ordered home. But he was not. Instead of being recalled, he had his mandate vastly expanded.
Smith was being sent an airplane, and its contents were fierce.
The Directorate of Operations had assigned a new code name to the Bolivian venture. This itself was a mark of front-burner status and keen interest. Smith’s operation would henceforth be called Bush Mechanic, and the mission was now specifically to terminate the insurgents. The previous tasking had been to frustrate the insurgency, the rhetorical difference translating into a full measure of force, murder, and mayhem to be applied individually and collectively against the guerrillas.
With these expanded responsibilities, two operational entities were being assigned to Smith. These units were code-named Famous, this prefix indicating that they were U.S. Army Special Forces operating under CIA control. The first outfit was to be called Famous Lawyer and the second, to follow in three weeks, Famous Traveler.
Lawyer was a hunter-killer group, a thirteen-man Special Forces A Team armed to the teeth. All were experienced operators seasoned in Vietnam, and until this assignment, they’d been serving as instructors at the School of the Americas in Panama. Famous Lawyer was a black outfit, meaning it did not officially exist, and neither the ambassador nor the military attaché would
be informed of their presence.
The follow-on group, Traveler, did exist and would be deliberately inserted with much hoopla. The job of Famous Traveler would be to train a Bolivian Ranger battalion; their activities would take place in the public domain, with press and photo opportunities. They would also provide a perfect diversion.
While training took place in the wide open, Famous Lawyer would surreptitiously find and fix the enemy, locating the guerrilla forces and base camps so the Bolivian army could at least try to take the field. The hunters were the lethal doppelgänger of the teaching team—American intervention in covert and deadly earnest.
About half an hour after noon, a C-130 cargo plane materialized from the heat. The huge aircraft droned through the sky, struggling to make itself visible, and then touched earth in a ruddy cloud of dust. As the propellers reversed pitch, the plane came toward them, lurching over the uneven places like some great clumsy animal that had broken free from a pen. The plane was bare metal, painted with a pair of small blue stripes down the length of the fuselage. There was a decal on the tail that advertised SOUTHERN AIRWAYS, but it might well have said anything. The paint job was what the industry called “low viz”; not camouflaged, just nonmilitary and forgettable. The paperwork indicated that the aircraft was a charter out of Panama, and its livery meant nothing. Even its tail number, N-8675J, was fake. The plane turned around at the end of the runway; its pilot was a dirt-strip maestro, shutting down the starboard engines so that not a wisp of dust blew in the direction of the waiting men.
The tail of the aircraft inched open, vehicle ramps were thrown over, and two jeeps and a truck were driven out of the plane as the engines idled. Smith and the others walked forward; a tall man with fair hair and a drooping mustache swung his legs from behind the steering wheel of the first jeep. He wore khaki trousers and a green polo shirt. His men were dressed in similar getups—chinos or blue jeans and short-sleeved shirts. None wore uniforms, though some carried rifles and others wore pistols in shoulder holsters. They were a hard-looking bunch.
Smith walked to the jeep and shook the tall man’s hand. “Welcome to Bolivia,” he said.
“I’m Holland,” the tall man answered. “We’re your lawyers.” Valdéz noticed that the jeeps were filled with Russian-made weapons and the truck was loaded with ammunition.
“Man, you brought some stuff,” Valdéz said.
“Enough to get started.” Holland wore a .45 automatic in a leather holster under his left arm. Smith noted that he was tanned. All of his men were; the lawyers had spent much time in the open.
“Who’s the head spook?” Holland asked.
“I’m running the in-country effort,” Smith said, then he nodded to Santavanes and Valdéz. “These are my associates.”
Holland put out his hand. “Name’s Rollo.”
“Javier,” Valdéz said.
“Santavanes.”
“Didn’t catch your first name?” Holland said.
“Señor Santavanes.”
Holland took Santavanes’s measure. It wasn’t likely that they would ever get along, but they understood each other at once.
“We didn’t get much notice from Panama that you were coming,” Smith said.
“Neither did we,” Holland answered.
Behind them, the aircraft’s engines roared, and they were all silent while the noise broke over them. Holland looked down the length of the runway as the C-130 took off. Trailing a plume of red dust, the huge aircraft climbed gracelessly into the sky. In a moment it was swallowed by cloud and lost from sight, and a few seconds later, even the sound of its engines had faded. The aircraft had been on the ground under five minutes.
“Where do you want us to set up?” Holland asked.
BY NIGHTFALL THE casita at the end of the runway had been augmented with sandbags and concertina wire. The Lawyers erected three large tents behind the house, one in which to sleep, one where they would cook and eat, and a third as an operations shop. They’d also placed three complicated-looking antennae on the roof of the adobe, a high-frequency wire, a short UHF antenna, and a odd-looking contraption, a set of aluminum tubes resembling a caduceus that would enable them to ricochet messages off orbiting satellites. To Valdéz, it was all very interesting, but for Santavanes, the tents, sandbags, and comm gear gradually bred a smoldering sort of annoyance. He did not like Green Berets much. Santavanes considered them a blunt instrument, while he considered himself to be a scalpel.
After dinner, Smith, Valdéz, Santavanes, and Holland sat in the main room of the adobe. Smith lit a lantern and poured some bourbon. Holland studied Hoyle’s map, which had been salvaged from the bombed offices in Camiri. Santavanes ate the last of his dinner, beans and rice, and watched Holland pace in front of the map.
“Who put this together?” Holland asked.
“Hoyle,” Smith answered. “He got his ribs broken in the ambush. He’s back in La Paz for a couple of weeks.”
Holland studied the terrain. On the map, the likeliest places for guerrilla bases had been circled with grease pencil. Holland’s understanding of topography was as keen as Hoyle’s. In the Ñancahuazú Valley and the adjoining countryside, there were tens of thousands of places to hide but only so much water. Holland knew, as Hoyle did, that water was as necessary to the guerrillas as ammunition.
It was likely that they would move and operate close to the watercourses. The places the rivers met, the junctions of valleys, were likely locations for base camps, storage caches, and communications stations. The networks of rivers and tributaries suggested a probable set of paths and intersections; places that were safe and places to be avoided. These facts of geography reduced the searchable areas considerably.
“How long will it take Traveler to train a counterguerrilla unit?” Smith asked.
“That depends—on how screwed up the Bolivians are and how good you want them to be.”
“They have to be good.”
“Six months,” Holland said.
August, Smith thought. It will be August before the Bolivians have any reliable units.
“You might get some faster tactical results if I put some of my people forward,” Holland said. “To advise the Bolivian field commanders.”
Santavanes snorted. “You go out with the Bolos, and you’ll get waxed.”
“You think so.” Holland’s eyes were directly on Santavanes. His statement ended flatly, not like a question. Like a statement.
“I’ll tell you something, Major. Paul Hoyle is one of the best field operators I ever met. He’s got more jungle time than you could ever dream about. He went out there and got hit by two bullets. It’s a fucking miracle he’s alive. I don’t know how good you think you are, but the people we are up against—they are goddamn good. As good as Charlie. As good as the Khmer Rouge. Good. This isn’t going to be over in a weekend.”
Holland said nothing; he turned and again looked at the map.
Smith was not a conciliatory person, but his words lessened the tension. “I want to limit your contact with the Bolivian army. Your people will operate solo. I want to start with recons and long-range patrols. First I want you to find the bad guys and tell me where they’re moving. Then I’ll make a decision on how to kill them.”
“Your call,” Holland said. “If you want this thing over fast, put some of my people into the field to lead the Bolivians.”
“Not yet,” Smith said.
Holland drank down the rest of his bourbon.
“When can you get started?” Smith asked.
“I’d like to get an overflight of the area,” Holland said. “I want my team leaders to see the valley from head to foot.”
“We can arrange that.”
“I can start putting teams out by the end of the week.”
“Good.”
The meeting was over.
“Thanks for the whiskey,” Holland said, and he walked back to his tents.
When he was gone, Santavanes tossed his tin plate into the bu
cket in the kitchen. “I think his beret’s too tight.”
Smith swung his feet up on a table and leaned back in his chair.
Scrubbing his plate in the lukewarm water, Santavanes continued to lay it on, cynical and facetious. “But I gotta admit, we’ve got a great location here. Five-thousand-foot runway—we can bring in a squadron of gunships. A hundred more advisers. We can really escalate.”
“There isn’t going to be any escalation,” Smith said.
“It’s already escalating, Mr. Smith. We got two teams of Green Berets we didn’t ask for.”
“They’ll be kept on a leash,” Smith said. He hoped that would be true.
Santavanes wiped his plate with a dishrag and waxed nostalgic. “You know, I was in Congo when it went to shit. In Brazzaville. Very dramatic. The CIA station chief and I got pulled off a roof by a Belgian helicopter. Tracers flying all over the place—it looked like New Year’s Eve.”
“And your point is?”
“That was six months after they sent in the Green Berets.”
Smith gave Santavanes a withering look.
“Hey, it’s just a story,” Santavanes said. “It could never happen here.”
21
TANIA WOKE ON the bed in her apartment. One of her shoes was on, one was off. Her suitcases were piled in the corner of the bedroom, and her coat was pulled over her. When she fell into bed, she had been too exhausted even to pull down the covers.
Beyond the windows, night sounds from the Calle Campero lifted her slowly out of her dark, calamitous sleep. She opened her eyes but did not move. The lights burned brightly in her bedroom; she recognized a few of her possessions and the noises from the street, but it took her a few minutes to realize where she was.
She had been traveling, and now she was home.
No. Not home. She was back in La Paz.
It was now two A.M. Tania sat up and swung her legs under her. She took off her dress, then her stockings. In her underwear, she picked up the Venezuelan passport and padded through the dark apartment out into the kitchen. She opened the window above the sink and ripped pages from the passport. She used a cigarette lighter to burn these one by one, turning on the faucet to put out the flames when each of the pages had burned, and then she stirred the ashes with her fingers so they would pass easily down the drain with the running water.
Killing Che Page 18