Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

  Arquero seethed. “Leave, Mr. Hoyle.”

  “I think I will,” Hoyle said. “Thanks for the drink.”

  As he walked through the mansion, cooks, mess boys, and sentries peeked through doorways and around corners, horror-struck. Not one of them said a word, or thought to do so, and as Hoyle started the Land Cruiser and drove away, he was quite surprised that no one took the opportunity to shoot him in the back.

  A LANTERN BURNED on the table in Hoyle’s room at the casita. The parts of his pistol were laid out on a blanket-covered table before him, as were oil and rags and a bore brush. Smith had burst in, throwing the curtain back and thrusting his face into the lamplight, as angry as any man would ever see him.

  “Jesus, goddammit! Do you have any idea what kind of cable traffic is flying around? Everybody from Ambassador Hielman to President Jesus goddamn Barrientos.” The edges of his glasses were collecting condensation. His voice had risen an octave, and it now bore the strong imprint of his New England upbringing, broad “A”s and swallowed “R”s, all rapid-fire and high-pitched, like the snarling of a terrier.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “You know goddamn well. I’m talking about that cripple you grabbed by the tonsils.”

  Hoyle made a show of assembling his pistol. “He was annoying me.”

  Smith’s hand came down on the unassembled pieces. He leaned his face into the circle of lantern light. “That cripple’s old man just happens to be the Bolivian ambassador to the UN. You got the entire southern half of the planet going apeshit right now. What the hell were you doing in Lagunillas?”

  “Looking for Charlie.”

  “What were you doing at the officers’ club?”

  “That asshole shot the prisoners.”

  “So?”

  “He murdered them.”

  “Shooting prisoners around here is a national fucking pastime! What the fuck were you thinking?”

  Hoyle stood and walked from the casita. As he passed through the front room, Valdéz and Major Holland tried their best to look deaf and invisible. Smith followed Hoyle out of the house, jabbering at him; the argument had taken on the character of a domestic dispute.

  “We don’t need this shit, Hoyle. We don’t need you going hostile on Bolivian officers.” Smith’s voice was getting louder.

  A head poked out of one of the tents behind the house. Hoyle and Smith were making a scene, and the Green Berets loved it.

  Hoyle said, “I punched him out. Big deal. You think it really matters if one more asshole gets punched out in this shitty country?”

  “It matters if you do it.”

  “I’m not going to sit by and watch peasants get shot.”

  “Yes, you are,” Smith said. “This is just a job. Bolivia is just another third-world shithole. Sometimes we prop them up, and sometimes we take them down. Don’t go righteous on me.”

  “Maybe it’s time somebody did.”

  Smith pulled Hoyle’s sleeve and turned his face into the light from the doorway. “What were you doing at the Ministry of Information last week?”

  “Who told you I was there?”

  “It doesn’t matter who told me. What were you doing?”

  Hoyle had no idea how much Smith knew, if he knew about Maria, or if he knew about the lake.

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Asking a few questions. I didn’t think the agency would mind.”

  “If it’s intelligence-related, I need to know about it,” Smith said. “If it’s personal, emotional, or physical, you’re goddamn right I mind.”

  “What are you, Mr. Tradecraft now?”

  “What were you doing at the ministry?”

  “The woman, Maria, she said she was Nicaraguan. Her accent is Cuban. I looked on her desk while you were in with the minister; she was working on visa requests. I saw the lists on her desk, but she lied about it. Alameda is selling passports. He probably did the paper for the Cuban team that’s operating in Ñancahuazú.”

  “You don’t know that. You think that. You don’t have any proof.”

  “The girl has proof.”

  “Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. What are you gonna do? Screw it out of her?”

  Hoyle began to feel anger. Smith’s next words would push him into fury. “Don’t go fucking this up over a piece of ass.”

  Hoyle grabbed Smith by the collar and slammed him into the wall of the house. His physical power astonished Smith—he had been pulled off his feet and whirled through the air. Hoyle bounced him off the wall, and Smith reached into his holster and jammed the muzzle of a snub-nosed .38 into Hoyle’s throat. Hoyle froze instantly at the flash of the gun in the moonlight.

  Smith’s voice was like death. “Let go of me.”

  Hoyle held on, fists full of shirt. His voice was devoid of even a wisp of fear. “You little fuck. You don’t have the balls to shoot me.”

  Smith’s thumb snapped back the hammer. The chrome gun was steady in his fist and now jammed tight against Hoyle’s jugular.

  “I’ll splatter your ass right here. Now listen.” Hoyle’s fist gripped harder on Smith’s collar. Smith yelled again: “LISTEN!”

  Panting in rage, Hoyle shoved Smith away.

  Smith still kept the pistol trained on Hoyle’s face. “The rifles we found at the farmhouse were part of a CIA shipment sent to the Bolivian National Police. Your friend Zeebus initiated the transfer back in October. It was supposed to be part of a routine assistance package. Colonel Arquero took delivery of the guns in Mexico City.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The guns we found at the guerrillas’ farmhouse came from the CIA.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “CIA Station Mexico City. Confirmed. In writing.”

  “Why would Arquero sell weapons to a Cuban expeditionary force?” Hoyle asked.

  “You’re going to find out.”

  Hoyle was bowled over. He’d expected corruption but not such perfect duplicity.

  Smith lowered the pistol. “We’ve got new orders from Langley. Guevara goes down. They don’t care how it gets done. We do whatever it takes to get Bolivians into the field.”

  “Is this Langley talking, or are you just bucking for a corner office?”

  “Both,” Smith said. “Langley wants this thing pinched off before it becomes a full-blown civil war. If the Bolivians won’t stomp the Cubans, we will.”

  Hoyle’s breathing became labored. The night around him seemed suddenly suffocating and hot as an open oven. How could this be? How could Arquero have tricked the CIA into shipping weapons? And why did no one notice when he just turned around and sold them on the open market?

  “How do I get Arquero to talk?”

  “I don’t care,” Smith said. “Do what you have to.”

  “Then no protocol. No more ass kissing.”

  “Do what you have to. Just make it deniable on our end.”

  Smith went back into the casita, and the sound of insects, billions of insects, swelled around Hoyle and filled the night as high up as the stars.

  Hoyle’s hands were trembling. Perhaps it was the revelation of Arquero’s treachery, perhaps it was anger, perhaps it was fear that this operation was spiraling wildly out of control. Hoyle was aware suddenly that people were staring. Half a dozen Green Berets had assembled by their tents. They’d enjoyed the show but probably would have preferred it if the argument had ended in a serious ass kicking. Hoyle stooped with embarrassment as they returned to their tents. Closer behind him, Charlie was waiting by the Land Cruiser.

  He, too, had seen everything. The night around them was alive with the buzzing of insects and the hoots of monkeys. Ten thousand sounds had been substituted for the colors of the day.

  Hoyle shook his head, self-conscious, still angry, still breathing like a man who’d climbed a ladder to a fifth-story window. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Charlie.”

  Charlie smiled. It was a rare and agreeable thing when he
did.

  “Do you think he would’ve shot me?” Hoyle asked.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie answered. “You think he would have missed?”

  33

  WORD OF HOYLE’S altercation with Major Placido had spread through the army faster than a list of promotions. Bolivian opinion of the incident was mixed. Brass, like blood, is thicker than water. Predictably, the murder of the two prisoners was not a topic of discussion. Prisoners, almost by definition, were guilty, and Placido had been within his rights to do with them as he chose. A few found it hard to believe that the execution of prisoners could be the real reason for Hoyle’s outburst.

  By the end of the week, all talk of the incident had faded. Placido’s thrashing was largely eclipsed by the discovery of the guerrillas’ equipment at the Zinc House. The newspapers, too, had learned of the operation in the Ñancahuazú, and Smith had flown to La Paz to ensure that Minister Alameda’s office handled the news without hysteria. That some of the weapons were American-made was known to the press, and through Alameda, Smith put out word that the arms were Korean War surplus. Kept secret was Arquero’s duplicity and the fact that a CIA arms shipment had been diverted to aid Communist insurgents.

  Also secret was Hoyle’s scheme to force Colonel Arquero to release Tania from prison. He planned this through a combination of physical coercion and blackmail. Hoyle’s arrangements were not yet complete, and though he’d wanted very much to accompany Smith and see Maria, Hoyle had not pressed to go to La Paz. Not yet.

  For several days, while Smith handled media relations in La Paz, Hoyle stayed at the casita in Vallegrande, working in absolute secrecy. Of the action against Arquero, Hoyle told Charlie only that the two of them would be in La Paz the following week. Hoyle asked Charlie to locate a safe place they could work from, a location outside the city. He also asked Charlie to find a place they could bury a body. Charlie, as always, followed Hoyle’s orders exactly and rendered no moral judgment.

  While Hoyle wrote and calculated in his little room, he kept mostly to himself. His altercation with Smith and the incident at the officers’ club had enhanced Hoyle’s standing with the Green Berets of Famous Lawyer. Special Forces generally had a low opinion of CIA men, finding them a bit squishy in the macho department. It helped also that Hoyle attended every one of Major Holland’s briefings, listening carefully to the plans for reconnaissance patrols and always walking with the troops to the helicopter in the evening when the teams were inserting. Hoyle also stood by the radio, listening as the recon teams checked in at six-hour intervals. When the Green Berets arrived back at the airfield, Hoyle was there, attending their debriefings and making sure there was beer. This guaranteed their affection.

  After two days, Holland’s men had found a set of trails, and after an additional four missions, they had established an observation point that controlled the narrowing valley below the confluence of the Ñancahuazú and the Rio Grande. Holland was confident that his observers would eventually spot the guerrillas at the river junction, and Hoyle was of the same mind. The noose on Guevara was tightening. Even Santavanes had to agree that the operators of Famous Lawyer were a highly professional bunch.

  Charlie returned from La Paz and reported that he had located a shack and garage at an abandoned rock quarry outside the city. He assured Hoyle that he had rented the place for the coming week and they could work there undisturbed. Hoyle informed Charlie, Santavanes, and Valdéz that they would leave for La Paz in the morning and told them nothing more. None thought the secrecy unusual. That evening Valdéz opened a bottle of rum with the Green Berets, Santavanes set about cleaning his pistols, and Charlie went into Vallegrande to visit yet another set of cousins.

  At midnight Hoyle retired to his room off the kitchen, took off his boots, and ducked under the mosquito netting draped over his cot. His ribs ached, and he was still occasionally pissing blood: the lingering effects of the ambush on the river. In the week or so he’d been away from La Paz, Hoyle had managed to send a note to Maria’s post office box, though to do so, he’d had to ask one of the Bolivian pilots to mail it. The note said only that he hoped to see her next Friday. It did not mention that he was to be in La Paz for most of the week.

  Since he’d come back into the field, Hoyle had been sleeping worse than ever. When he did sleep, he often dreamed of Maria; there was still the issue of pitching her, asking her expressly and unequivocally to gather information within Alameda’s office.

  Maria and Hoyle already had given each other secrets. The secrets of their real names. The secrets of their real lives—of Maria’s life in Cuba and of Hoyle’s childhood adrift in the world. And, looming hugely for both of them, the secret of their affair. Although Hoyle tried again not to think of it, he knew he had compromised Maria by becoming her lover; in the trade, this was his handle, the means by which he could control her.

  But he did not control her—yet. Rather, what he had done was to allow her in. He had provided enough information to enable her to make assumptions about why he was in Bolivia. Her assumptions were largely correct but were far from complete. Maria did not know specifically that Hoyle was here to fight the insurgents; nor did she know that he’d been wounded. Perhaps she’d guessed this; his story about a traffic accident was weak, and she’d seen the yellowing bruises on his ribs and watched him move in obvious pain.

  She did not even know where in the country he worked when he was not in La Paz. Maria guessed that Hoyle was some sort of intelligence officer working in murky connection with the Bolivian army. She knew the army was battling what the government called “antisocial elements,” and she knew that much of this struggle took place in the Ñancahuazú Valley. She gathered, as every Bolivian did, that the insurgents were Communist. The rest was a mystery to her. She did not pry, as she felt the need to keep secrets of her own.

  Lying on his cot, Hoyle let the idea play in his head: He would definitely pitch her when he saw her. And then, just as firmly, he thought that he would not. With his eyes closed, Hoyle thought that he would never pitch her, that he would only take her as his lover, and that he would not burden her anymore about what he was doing here. This idea made him feel better, and he rolled over and tried fitfully to sleep.

  He need not ask her to spy. The notion made Hoyle happy for only an instant, and then that joy collapsed into gloom. His growing affection for her was a liability; intelligence officers are meant to use people, compromise them, coerce them, exploit them, and discard them; that was the way things were played. And in the cold, hard calculus of the Game, it did not matter what Hoyle felt for Maria or what she felt for him. Maria’s life and Hoyle’s were nothing. They were specks, not even cogs, mere flyspecks on a vast, intricate machine, wheels within wheels, mirrors and smoke and lies and official denials, implied consents and secret agendas.

  Rolling over again on the small, sticky cot under the mosquito net in the grimy casita off the runway in Vallegrande, surrounded by a vastness of jungle and the hot, grasping fist of night, Hoyle wished he were in La Paz, in a hotel room, under crisp sheets, in Maria’s perfumed and willing arms. Hoyle wished he were her lover and only her lover. He wished they were two normal people. Perhaps he was becoming a burned-out case, but he did not care. Maybe it was sleep enchanting him, maybe it was the codeine he had taken to kill the pain in his back and to help him sleep. Hoyle did what he could to forget everything except Maria, beautiful Maria, and he did his best to invent a calm place, a place a thousand light-years away from Bolivia and the men he had been hired to kill and the fact that he was a puppet soldier sent to fight in a secret war. Hoyle invented a safe place and dreamed that he could take Maria there and keep her away from the fall and the darkness and the hurt.

  Hoyle expected his work in La Paz to take three or four days, and after it was concluded, he would be able to see Maria. He tried only to think of that reunion, but he was forced to consider all that came with it—complication and lies and half-truths. He could not have Maria, not without
these things, not without mortal consequence, and what finally forced Hoyle to sleep was the thoroughgoing hopelessness of it all.

  34

  COLONEL ARQUERO WAS a man of punctilious if not always punctual habits. So it was that he worked into the early evening of Monday, thirty minutes late for a dinner engagement with Colonel Carlos Zapas, the minister of finance. Across his desk came the usual: reports on the personal lives of President Barrientos’s political enemies, transcripts of interrogations, dossiers of arrested individuals, and a very short list of people released from custody. Minister Zapas would be behind schedule, as he always was, and Arquero was in no hurry to leave his desk. He’d sent Lieutenant Castañeda to fetch his car and as he walked down the long marble corridors of the Palacio de Justicia, the few remaining officers and secretaries took heed of the clicking of the colonel’s boots and scurried back to their workplaces.

  The evening was cool and growing cold as Arquero passed out of the huge iron-bound doors, then down the stairs and into the street. The city had become muted, and above, the sky was immaculately clear, still blue in the last defiant hue of daylight before the stars would shine.

  His car was parked where he expected it, but somewhat to his displeasure, the colonel did not find Castañeda waiting to open the door. Arquero shifted his leather satchel in his hand and pulled at the handle. He had only half an instant to form irritation at this before a pair of shadows came out of the blackness behind him. Two large men shoved the colonel bodily into the car. As he was jammed through the door, Arquero was quite surprised to see Lieutenant Castañeda bound and gagged and lumped on the floor of the backseat. Arquero was struck across the face with the pistol, and a voice growled at him from behind a ski mask.