The fat man seemed surprised to see Hoyle. “A warrant has been issued for her arrest.”
“What for?”
“The murder of Colonel Arquero.”
“She had nothing to do with that.”
Zeebus shifted on his feet. He was looking about for the mechanics to put the stairs back against the airplane. “There’s an Interpol red notice on her,” Zeebus said, and he tried to brush past.
Hoyle lifted his arm to block him. “Let it slide.”
“Not this time, Hoyle. The warrant came from the president’s office.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“It’s real. She’s a material witness in an assassination. You should have told me she was involved.”
“She had nothing to do with it.” This time Hoyle physically checked Zeebus from advancing.
Zeebus’s eyes flashed. “Listen, Hoyle,” he said. “You have no status here.” “Status” meant diplomatic immunity. Hoyle was as open to police arrest as anyone else in Bolivia. Zeebus stepped past Hoyle and was brought to a halt by a distinct and fatal-sounding click.
He turned, they both did, and Smith stood close by. “Forget it, Cosmo,” Smith said. “Just stand here and wave goodbye.”
Smith had a newspaper in his hand, and sticking out from under it was the short barrel of a .38-caliber revolver. The weapon was aimed at Zeebus’s belly.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Smith. Not here. Not in front of a hundred people.”
Smith’s other hand dipped into his jacket. He pulled out a sheaf of paper. “This is a draft cable to the Directorate of Operations. A special addendum to the after-action report. You might be interested, Cosmo. It’s all about you.”
“What are you talking about?” Zeebus lifted his hand toward the paper. Hoyle watched as Smith lifted it up out of his reach.
“The guns you sold to Arquero?” Smith glanced over the paper. “Four hundred carbines and a hundred grease guns? Twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition? Astounding.”
Zeebus almost flinched at the words. “That was authorized,” he stammered, “by Langley.”
“But you lost control of the goods,” Hoyle said. “Arquero turned around and sold your rifles to the guerrillas. That sounds like dereliction of duty. Now, how would that look in The Washington Post? ‘CIA Sells Arms to Cuban Communists’?”
Zeebus started to go pink, then gray. “Arquero sold them, not me.”
“You sold them to Arquero.” Hoyle shook his head. “Face it, Cosmo. Your contact single-handedly equipped the Bolivian insurgency. How’s that going to look in your 201 file?”
The fat man clenched his jaw. The lights of Berlin flickered and went out.
On the runway, the engines were loud now, and the big plane turned about on one set of wheels and rolled unhurriedly down the taxiway.
“So here’s the deal,” Smith said. “We shred this—”
Zeebus grunted. “In exchange for what?”
“She travels. Zero interference from you,” Hoyle said.
“What am I supposed to do about Interpol?”
“That’s your problem. Make the red notice go away, or we cable Langley about your guns.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“We might do it anyway, you asshole,” Smith said.
Zeebus looked at the plane. “Give me the cable,” he said, panting.
“Deal?”
“Fuck you, Hoyle. Yes, deal.” Zeebus’s fat hand flapped. “Gimme the goddamn cable.”
Smith placed the pistol in the pocket of his jacket and tossed the paper at Zeebus. Engines roared; the plane took a long roll and climbed slowly into the sky, pulling behind it a thin brown trail of soot.
Zeebus crumpled the paper and jammed it into a pocket. “No more favors. You’re finished, Hoyle. You’re little people from now on.”
Smith and Hoyle walked to the terminal.
Zeebus called after Hoyle, “I hope she was worth it.”
Hoyle did not look back. They walked through the glass doors and out into the parking lot. In the west, the sun was bright but very close to the horizon. It was the time for parting; the longer they stayed together, the greater the complications would be.
“I normally make it a point not to expect acts of valor from other people,” Hoyle said.
Smith said nothing. His expression was impossible to read. He’d attended the press conference where Presidente Barrientos had claimed Che Guevara was killed in battle. Not murdered, but fallen on an honorable field of combat. Smith knew that the other guerrillas captured in the Yuro ravine had also been killed—martyrs for an idea and grist for the machine.
Hoyle stopped at the Land Cruiser and put his hand on the door. “You said this was just another shithole—”
“It still is,” Smith said. There was no contempt in his voice. He, too, felt a sense of blame.
“Then why did you help me?”
“It took me a while to figure out that the questions are black and white, and all the answers are gray.”
Smith had satisfied himself; he had done one thing for someone else. He might have done more, if possible, but he had made a small act of contrition. Smith had turned his back and let murder happen—Guevara’s destruction had, after all, been his mission—but now he had made for himself a quiet conscience.
Smith looked back at the terminal. They both knew the sanctions that would be taken against them might not be merely administrative and professional. They might be physical.
“He was serious about little people. How are you going to get out of here?”
“Disappearing is the easy part,” Hoyle said.
Smith put out his hand. “Good luck to you, Mr. Hoyle.”
Hoyle had a feeling that he was jinxed and that luck, if it ever again attended to him, would not be good. Hoyle took Smith’s hand and said, “Buena suerte.”
Hoyle dipped behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser and pulled off into the traffic in front of the terminal.
He turned onto the dusty airport road, and then northwest, away from the city. The road dipped toward the sun, but Hoyle did not have a destination. It was a thousand kilometers of hard, unknown country to anyplace that might give refuge. To the northeast was Cochabamba, and west from there, Peru and jungle rivers twisting to the sea. It was the same distance south and east through the Chaco to Paraguay; and closer but more dangerous was the frontier to Chile. They would wait for him there; his face was known, this vehicle, too. Hoyle would head north.
The awful jumble of the last few months swirled in his brain, and he told himself that none of this would ever be his business again. An enterprise that had once been only mercenary had turned rotten. A hundred dishonorable facts were already growing walls like cells in a wasps’ nest. Hoyle would exile them in a desert place in his brain. He knew, unhappily, he hadn’t the strength of character to do otherwise.
There was an envelope in his pocket. Folded in half and half again was Guevara’s letter to his wife. It would mean nothing to Zeebus, nor would it have figured into Smith’s reports. Hoyle would post it to one of the addresses found among Tania’s papers—one that would forward the letter on to Havana. Hoyle would do this once he was safe.
It was mostly dark behind him and the hulking mass of Huayna Potosí was drenched in orange light. Below it, the lesser peaks of the Cordillera Real clumped together like penitents wanting absolution. Hard shadows came up from the roadway. It seemed a forever distance to the place where the sun was touching the horizon—an insurmountable journey—but Hoyle drove on.
Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank, not just for help and encouragement while I wrote this novel, but for keeping me among the living. Love to Stacey, my wife, and to Paddy, my son, who reminded me that there is more in the world than the inside of other people’s heads. I owe you.
Thanks to my father and mother, who have cheered me on, checked my homework, tucked me in, and patched me up long after I might have been e
xpected to quit running into brick walls. I’m a singularly lucky man. Thanks to my dear friends Downs and Marianne Mathews, old hands in the writer’s game who lent a keen eye and blue pencil to early drafts. This book is better because of you.
Gracias siempre to a friend and comrade who wishes to remain anonymous, Operator 143, who more than any other person advised on strategy, paid attention to the narrative, predicted the unpredictable, rallied the troops, and kept me on the trail through a long and arduous campaign.
Thanks also to readers of early drafts who put eyes on and told me where I was going: David Freed, Doug Stanton, Dr. Mac-Daddy Evans (himself a damn fine novelist), Karl and Nan Couyoumjian, Bob and Pam Currey, and photojournalist Steve Rowe. Liz Grenemyer, who told me of boarding school in Germany, and again my pop, whose own experiences added to the descriptions of war in the jungle. I had help with clandestine work from a trio who wish to remain anonymous, old Company hands who have moved behind the curtain on the stages of history: Thanks to the Count, Fuzzy, and Mr. BPA.
My agents—not secret but literary—Julia Lord and Joel Milliner, need to be mentioned as friends and wiser souls. Special thanks to my editor, Bob Loomis, at Random House, who patiently helped me through the underbrush and who again took a chance on me. Tu etes el Jefe. Thanks also to Dennis Ambrose and Beth Thomas for diligent copyediting and preparation of the manuscript.
Thanks to David Lindroth for the maps that accompany this book. The originals were drawn by my own somewhat shaky hand and bore only grudging resemblances to facts on the ground in Bolivia. Apologies also for the spellings of place-names; many are words taken from the Quecha language and are inconsistently rendered in the source material. Again, any irregularities or mistakes are my own. Thanks a million to Lance Moody and Mike Kirton, two comrades who never stopped believing.
If this book seems realistic in historical detail it is because of the scholarship of the biographers of Che Guevara, among them Henry Butterfield Ryan (The Fall of Che Guevara: A Story of Soldiers, Spies, and Diplomats), Jorge Castañeda (Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara), and Jon Lee Anderson (Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life).
My work was informed by hundreds of other sources, including Che Guevara’s own writing and those of his comrades in the Ñancahuazú, the survivors, and those who sacrificed all. A list of historical and biographical material, as well as a brief epilogue, can be found on my website at www.killingche.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHUCK PFARRER is the author of Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL. A counterterrorism consultant to the U.S. and foreign governments, he is also a screenwriter whose credits include The Jackal, Darkman, Red Planet, Hard Target, Virus, and Navy SEALs. He lives in Michigan.
ALSO BY CHUCK PFARRER
WARRIOR SOUL
The Memoir of a Navy SEAL
SAINT BRENDAN’S BOAT
Copyright © 2007 by Chuck Pfarrer
Maps copyright © 2007 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-579-8
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