Julio was astounded by a ripping noise and then the banging flutter of point-blank automatic fire. He saw another Ranger, and another, all of them with their faces green and eyes like bogeymen. Julio managed to push forward the safety on his weapon, but not to fire. Two bullets struck him in the chest, and with a yelp, he turned, staggering for the door. Two more bullets found him, and he collapsed on the threshold, a geyser of blood spraying the wall from a wound to the side of his neck.
Outside the house, the noise of the first shots was muffled, a thudding series of bangs. Miguel turned in the street and saw Coco tumble backward through the doorway and into the dirt. He stepped toward his wounded friend, and their eyes met, but a bullet was fired through the front window of the house, and this struck Miguel in the center of his knee. He pitched forward; he had not yet seen a single enemy soldier. His leg crumpled beneath him, and he crawled forward to Coco, shouting. He could see Julio sprawled in the doorway, his body and the overburdened rucksack blocking the door, and he could see shadows moving in the house.
More gunfire came through the window, and the muzzle of a rifle poked through the door. As Miguel saw the rifle dip and fire two more bullets into Julio, he managed to drag Coco behind the horse trough. Bullets ripped through the wood, and the water went up in thin fingers. Miguel could now see Begnino pushing his way toward them. Begnino squeezed a long burst of automatic fire at the front of the house, and the shooting stopped within. He made it to the trough, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and grabbed Coco and Miguel by the back of their collars. He did not say a word, just pulled them off their asses and dragged them around the corner across the street. As they neared the corner of the buildings, shooting started again, and Begnino yelled down the street for covering fire.
Guevara ran across the small open space in front of the telegraph office and found shelter behind the steps of a small house. The sound of the ambush at first seemed to paralyze the comrades. The noise echoed through the several houses, and no one could see from where the shots were being fired or by whom. Guevara’s mind became clear, as it always did when there was fighting, and the drab colors of the little town grew vivid in his eyes. The sky became like a vast jewel split open above him, the clouds and sunlight suddenly brilliant; he could smell the sharp tang of powder and hear a steady firing of bursts. Crouching, he moved forward against the wall, down two small houses, and toward the corner. A pulse of fire smashed through the adobe over his head, knocking him back and sending a cloud of powdered brick from the side of the building. There was shouting, and he bent around the corner and tried to figure out who was firing. He saw Begnino drag two men away from the horse trough and around the corner. It looked as though he’d done so out of exhaustion or because he had tripped, but then Guevara saw Begnino flinch and scramble back close up against the wall; he could see in his face a flash of confusion and pain. Begnino, too, had been shot—a bullet had grazed his shoulder—and he took cover against the wall, shaking his head and cursing.
The three wounded men were for the next several moments safe. The column surged through the village toward the sound of fire and took cover around Guevara. A steady barrage was put into the small adobe, and the front of the building was pocked thoroughly. The Rangers inside took cover, one of them sprawling flat behind the body of Julio, still wedged in the front door. Begnino and Coco were dragged back toward the telegraph office. As Guevara and Willy moved forward to bring Miguel to safety, a dozen bullets plunged out of the sky, knocking up dust around them. Miguel jerked and went limp between them, his rifle falling from his hands.
Guevara looked up. It was as though the bullets had rained out of thin air. On the ridge above the village, he saw a dozen more soldiers, moving and shooting; another group was across the road leading to Jagüey and taking cover in a horse corral on the other side. A deadly, plunging fire would soon envelop the entire town. Guevara dragged Willy away from Miguel’s body, and they pulled Coco into the safety of the telegraph office.
Guevara slammed and barricaded the door. On the dirt floor, the wounded man twitched in a widening pool of blood, his breath wheezing out between pursed gray lips. Willy was opening a first-aid kit, fumbling with a bandage in a brown plastic package, but it was obvious to all that Coco’s wound was mortal. In the corner of the room, the old woman and the dwarf girl cowered in terror.
“We have to move,” Guevara said, “back down the road—downhill into cover.”
Coco writhed on the floor, gushing blood. Begnino clutched him helplessly. Willy continued to unwrap the bandage, fixed on the idea of somehow fixing Coco.
Guevara said, “Begnino and I will take Coco. Get the others—”
“No,” Coco gasped, “not me.” He was wet from the waist down, soaked to the skin with gore.
“Hang on, friend,” Guevara said, “we’re going to take you back to the horses.”
“It’s over, Comandante,” Coco said. His voice was choked; his throat was filling up with blood. “Forget me.”
With astonishing deftness, Coco pulled the pistol from Guevara’s holster, thumbed back the hammer, and shot himself in the head. Spattered by gore, Willy crabbed backward. The sound of the weapon was so crashing and unexpected that it was not immediately comprehended that Coco had taken his own life.
In the corner of the room, the old woman wailed, an inarticulate paroxysm of horror. Begnino’s legs gave out under him; he slid down against the wall and swooned forward. Pistol smoke curled through the slanting light like the horrible evaporation of a nightmare.
For a few incomprehensible seconds, the shadows of the three men set on Coco’s body. Just an instant before, he had been their friend and a comrade, and only five minutes ago, he had walked and laughed with all the world of life in him. His fingers gave a spasm and then he moved no more.
In the next instant, a burst of gunfire tore through the door, wood chips and dust roiled into the gloomy space, and bullets cracked everywhere against the walls. Everyone went to the floor, and it seemed almost as though the house were being shaken by a gigantic hand.
Guevara reloaded his carbine, and the others sat speechless in shock. Guevara alone seemed to remember that they were locked in battle.
“Get your squad. I’ll cover you.”
Begnino looked up, his face twisted into a grotesque blank.
“Head downslope for the ravine.”
Guevara kicked at Begnino. When he did not look away from Coco’s body, Guevara kicked him harder. “Do what I say!” he bellowed.
Guevara lifted the pistol from the dirt next to Coco’s fingers and returned it to his holster. Across the street, he could see Pombo framed in a window. He whistled loudly and waved for him and the others to withdraw. Pombo nodded in response and pointed back into the village, toward the place the road came in from Picacho.
“Leave the dead,” Guevara barked. “Take the ammunition from their packs.”
Begnino and Willy did as they were told, their bloody fingers removing magazines and bandoliers from the two dead men. Carrying their weapons and this extra ammunition, they pushed through the office and climbed out a window in the back. Guevara leaped after them, his foot splashing in a black puddle of Coco’s blood.
The old woman and the dwarf girl sat and rocked, sat and rocked; the woman muttered like an idiot, unhinged by violence.
Forever after in the village where she lived, the old woman would be called mad, and the little dwarf girl, the misshapen child with the luminous eyes, she would stay mute until the day she died.
THE SOUND OF gunfire drifted up to the ridge above the little town. The firefight surged and faded, rallied, and then finally sputtered out as the guerrillas took up their wounded and broke contact. Most of the village could be seen from the high ground—it was almost visible end to end—and Smith and Major Holland watched the Rangers move forward from their position at the horse corral and link up with the team that had hidden in the adobe at the edge of town.
Under a cover
ing fire from a machine gun on the hill, a second squad of Rangers reached the center of the village and went from house to house. They signaled that the guerrillas were gone, having fled first down the Picacho road and then into the ravine that ran parallel to it, a place called Quebrada del Yuro, a densely vegetated, steep-sided draw that ran for about a mile north and south.
With their weapons slung in front of them, Smith and Major Holland made their way downhill and into the village. They watched Rangers turn over a body lying by the horse trough; others kicked open the doors of houses. Shouting, they moved women and children together into one of the dusty spaces between the houses, an alley near the center of the village. Three corpses were brought into the center place, guerrilla dead. The Ranger team from the adobe house was cheered by their compatriots.
The company commander was an unusually tall captain named Gerald Padero Cespedes. He had come with his radio operator from the road by the horse corral; his face was flushed, and he was euphoric. Like the other Rangers, he had black tape holding clutches of vegetation against his arms and legs for camouflage. It had been effective. Almost forty men had lain hidden in the short scrub on the hillsides above the village. The guerrillas had not seen a single Ranger until the men in the adobe opened fire.
Cespedes held the radio headset against his ear and listened; the radioman stood at the end of the cord and grinned.
“The guerrillas are withdrawing,” the captain said. A highly professional demeanor did not contain his joy.
“You’ve done a superb job, Captain,” Major Holland said.
“As long as they head downhill, I advise you not to pursue,” Smith said to the captain. “Let them break contact.”
Cespedes understood at once. The ridges around the Yuro ravine were devoid of cover. The guerrillas would be surrounded and sealed off. Holding the handset, he gave a few curt orders, and the crackle of radio receivers could be heard echoing from several places in the village.
Smith and Holland stood together and looked at the road twisting down and away from La Higuera.
“Who’s on the other side of the ravine?” Smith asked.
“Sergeant Godshall. Lawyer Four.”
Smith seemed to think for moment, looking at the terrain. “It’s all over,” he said.
Major Holland knelt by the body of Julio; the corpse had been dragged from the doorway and laid out in the street. In a dispassionate, clinical manner, Holland dropped the magazine from Julio’s weapon and ejected a round from the chamber. He then went through the man’s pockets and after that, the contents of his rucksack.
“Mr. Valdéz, stay with Captain Cespedes. I want all the other Lawyer units pulled back. The Bolivians will finish the operation.”
Valdéz had just sauntered down off the hill. He’d been stationed next to the machine gunners concealed on the ridge and watched the engagement with barely constrained glee.
“What about the snipers?” he asked. “You want to keep them in?”
“Have Rangers take over the observation posts. This will be a Bolivian kill.”
Holland returned from his search of Julio’s body. He carried a thin spiral notepad and a map folded in squares and wrapped in wax paper. The map revealed the guerrillas’ progress across the valley. On it, every camping spot was circled and dated. The penciled line ended at La Higuera.
“He’s in a box, son,” Holland said to Valdéz. “Houdini and a hard-on couldn’t get out of that canyon. It’s fucking over.”
Valdéz removed three cigars from a case in his pocket. He handed one to Smith and one to Holland, and they lit them and smoked. No one said anything; it seemed a time for important words, and none came to tired men. The Rangers were now swarming over the place. They’d emerged from their hidden positions on the sides of hills, dozens and dozens more, and it once again seemed astounding to Smith that so many men had hidden, surrounding the village in plain sight. Every one of the Rangers knew that a victory had been won and that their enemy, so long successful, had been mauled and was at bay.
Valdéz walked toward the last house at the edge of the village. He looked off down the sloping road and into the canyon of Quebrada del Yuro. It was a bad, wild place.
That’s where they belong, he thought. Fucking putos.
56
HOYLE’S NAP-DREAM was full of whispering shadows; the dreamscape around him gradually became blue, shot through with slanting rays of light, the fearsome hue of deep ocean water. In the dream, Hoyle was a victim of shipwreck and saw Maria floating among the wreckage. He swam to her as she sank, and he dived after her, deeper and deeper into blue desolation. Her hair bloomed around her face, that unmatched, beautiful face, and her eyes implored him to rescue her, but he was drawn away by some current. His hands briefly grappled her, held her, but she was pulled from his grasp and sank down into cobalt.
Hoyle felt a sorrow worse than he could have ever imagined. He had thought himself inoculated against grief, for he’d seen a thousand tragedies, but the dream imparted a suffocating sense of dread and then desolation and loss. Hoyle woke with his shoulder blades against the dank stucco of the abandoned farmhouse and sat completely still. It was late afternoon, and he’d been yanked from this dream by the repeated noise of a crow. His arms and legs were cramped, and a clammy sweat had soaked though his shirt and vest.
He pulled his legs under himself and stood. He’d slept barely an hour, he guessed, only long enough for his muscles to cramp and his head to be made foggy. Tania lay on the pallet with her eyes closed. The yellow sunlight sloped through the doorway and gave her skin the cast of an alabaster saint. It was so still and quiet in the small farmhouse that it seemed to Hoyle all the earth had stopped spinning and nothing anywhere would ever move again.
Hoyle turned when he heard footfalls, and it took a few long seconds to register that the man standing framed in the doorway was not Charlie but Colonel Arquero. The colonel had a Mauser pistol in his hand, and next to him stood a plainclothed policeman who carried a short, jagged-looking machine pistol. Hoyle took a step backward. His own rifle leaned against the wall next to Tania, and it was a hopeless fantasy to even think he could reach it.
“Put your hands up,” Arquero said.
There was an unaccountable note of civility in the colonel’s voice. The policeman had stepped completely into the room and leveled his weapon at Hoyle. He was a mestizo with black eyes like voids; there was no doubt that he would shoot Hoyle down, and casually, so Hoyle lifted his hands.
Charlie appeared behind Arquero and stood self-possessed. He had the wan look of a betrayer but gazed steadily at Hoyle, not averting his eyes though watching haughtily, as if trying to make a judgment.
“You look surprised, Mr. Hoyle,” Arquero said. “It’s an expression I find amusing.”
“Is this your cousin, Charlie?” Hoyle said.
Charlie’s expression did not change, nor did he turn away. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hoyle. This was business.” His voice was full and clear, as though he felt no shame for giving Hoyle to his enemy. Charlie acted as if what he had done was for the good of everyone.
Colonel Arquero handed a wad of green-yellow Bolivianos to Charlie and dismissed him with a feline tap of his wrist. Charlie slipped the money into his pocket and glided away through the door.
Hoyle could see the shiny faces of the weapons’ muzzles and black down their barrels; it seemed as though the gun barrels held fast small chunks of night.
“We had quite a complicated ambush waiting for you on the road to Vallegrande,” Arquero said. “You really would have approved.” The colonel’s eyes brushed to Tania. “But since you wouldn’t come to us, we came to you.” He aimed the pistol down at the woman’s face.
“She’s dead,” Hoyle said. Death had come for Tania in the last hour before dawn. So gently had life slipped out of her that she had only once dreamed of paradise, and she was there.
The policeman nudged Hoyle back with the muzzle of the machine gun, and Arquero put his fing
ers to Tania’s throat. She was cold and her skin was damp. A small exhalation came from Arquero, the noise of a suppressed grunt, and his eyes seemed to close slightly in thought. The expression on his face was strangely bored, though the corner of his lip bent in exactly one half of a smile.
“I’m sure you made every attempt to live up to your ridiculous bargain, Mr. Hoyle. You do impress me as a very earnest type.” Arquero waved his pistol at the door. “Now,” he said, “you will carry her body to the river, and then we will go for a ride.”
THE ROAD TO Vallegrande got better the closer they drove to town, and eventually, it leveled out and became paved. Hoyle sat in the backseat, his hands bound in front of him. The policeman drove the familiar route, and Arquero leaned over the front seat, keeping the pistol trained at Hoyle’s chest. They were driving toward the airfield and the casita. Hoyle’s place of refuge would be no place of safety. All of the Green Berets of Famous Lawyer were with Smith in the field, and the house was empty.
“It occurs to me, Mr. Hoyle, that you were particularly unsuited for this assignment.”
“You know, I guess I have been insufficiently ruthless.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” The colonel’s arm draped over the car seat carelessly, but the ugly muzzle of the gun remained steady. Arquero had seen through the masked interrogation and correctly ascertained the parties behind his blackmail. He had done this shortly after his abduction by determining who had benefited from his coercion. His revenge on Hoyle had been long in gestation and meticulous in its preparation.
“Did you really think I’d be taken by your ridiculous masquerade?”
“Why not? This whole country’s a goddamn Halloween party.”
Killing Che Page 46