by Buck Sanders
“It’s been hours,” she replied. “I’m to your left, I think. You’ve been out for hours!”
“Don’t worry, I’m okay. My headache keeps getting worse, though.”
o “I can’t see anything.”
“We’re at opposite ends of the room. There’s some light over here. Barely visible.” With one hand Slayton groped the floor, passing over muddy, stained wood and mounds of human feces. He touched an arm. There was a dead body in the room, just outside his cell.
“Why aren’t you talking?” asked Wilma.
“There’s a corpse here.” A pause. “It’s Orial.”
“Oh my God!” She cried. The events of the past several hours were building up inside her, unleashing an angry torrent of tears. “I don’t know how to say this, Ben,” she sobbed. “Those men… that sadist Baal raped me… it was horrible!” Her cries were incoherent; she could not articulate clearly through her overwhelming grief.
“Get some sleep,” said Slayton, smoldering with fury, but holding onto an exterior cool.
“We’re going to die.”
“Just get some rest, Wilma. We’ll need our strength.”
Eventually, she fell asleep. Slayton was tired, sore, angry, and humiliated. While drifting into slumber, he clung to the fury within, driving out all else. There was little to rationalize in this predicament: Wilma was probably correct in assuming they’d both be dead come sunrise. Bathurst would waste no time in executing them, he thought. But the pure will to survive compelled him to search for a plan, a scheme, a deal. Would none work? Nonsense; anything was possible. He had to ultilize primitive urges and survival tactics to emerge unscathed this time. No one wilt rescue you, that’s what Winship had said.
The golden-grass dream returned. He was standing in the field, hearing his cold heart beat, feeling the ecstatic warmth of the sun. And it was the future. He was alive, and it was in the future. Wilma’s voice filtered in, “We’re going to die.”
The sun grew hotter.
12
Morning brought a surreal quality to the bayou spring. Fierce yellow-white streaks of sunlight, splitting into individual filaments, projected through tall grass, radiating fog-killing warmth. The tule fog hadn’t lifted yet, at two minutes past six. A breeze blew a beer can across the compound.
Bathurst led Slayton and Wilma to the dock, near the spot where Orial had been shot the previous night. Baal, Merriott, Bonn, Donati, and others were assembling along the courtyard, facing the two prisoners. They drank coffee while some others ate their breakfast of eggs, sausage, and toast.
Morning brought out the true middle-class attitudes in terrorists, didn’t it? Slayton felt the breeze lift. The sun shone through a bending fern. It was very warm.
“What a beautiful day for a hunt,” said Bathurst, shielding the warm rays with his hand.
Wilma sneezed:
“I hope you found the accommodations satisfactory, Mr. Slayton, Miss Christian?” The Commander had a pathological weakness: the insanity of war brought out his sadistic nature. In the years prior to Vietnam, it lay hidden beneath a layer of guilt-edged Catholicism. It dared not surface then, but it had taken control now.
He paced to and fro in front of Slayton and Wilma, slapping his side holster which contained a World War Two Luger. “We’ve deeded to make sport of you two. It isn’t every day someone disrupts our peaceful existence so markedly as you have, Mr. Slayton. We respect that quality.
“We are on a plain surrounded by miles and miles of swamp—no towns, very few people, mostly wilderness. You will be armed with one bayonet. Bonn!”
The rusty scabbard thrown at Slayton’s feet contained the knife. Slayton picked it up, smiling. “What do you suggest? You and I have a showdown in some deserted sugar cane field?”
“How unsporting,” declared Bathurst. “In reality, Slayton, you and Miss Christian may walk to the boat over yonder and sail out of here any time you wish.”
“Very sporting of you, David,” was Slayton’s sarcastic response. “And of course you, or perhaps all these men, will wait ten minutes and follow.”
Wilma’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You’re not serious?”
“Quite the contrary,” chuckled Bathurst. “You will have approximately thirty minutes, starting now, to reach almighty civilization by boat and by foot. We will use everything in our power—helicopters, guns, knives, whatever we can find—to stop you and kill you.”
“And if we manage to get out?” Slayton dreamed of something like that happening.
Bathurst removed the gun from its holster. “If, by some miracle, that happens, you live, of course.”
Slayton remarked, “Naturally I can’t trust you, Bathurst.”
“Trust doesn’t enter into it. It’s a matter of survival. For both of us. You make it to the outside, then The Brigade suffers from the American government knowing of its plans. If I kill you both, and I will, then its plans are safe.”
Wilma exclaimed, “Ben, this is ridiculous, we can’t possibly… ”
“You now have used thirty seconds of your thirty minutes.” Bathurst looked down at his watch, continuing, “We’ll be starting the helicopter’s engines in ten minutes.”
Slayton motioned to Wilma. They boarded the dinghy, which had only one oar, and cast off.
From the front line of Brigaders standing on the dock came Bonn’s comment, “Hey, Slayton! Your woman there, she was a good show last night. Thought you’d like to know she’s some horny bitch! Ask old Baal!”
Wilma swung her fist in the air: “You goddam animal!” Bathurst commanded: “Bonn, silence!”
The boat pulled away, Slayton raising one hand and pointing angrily at the group: “I’ll be sending the Air Force to napalm this fuckin’ zoo, Bathurst!”
Many of the soldiers erupted in howls of laughter, others chanted a few anticapitalist slogans, and one outraged participant shouted, “I want to kill! I want to kill!” It was Crazy Laser Orange.
They agreed not to bathe until an hour had passed and their trail was confused with cutbacks. They hoped a sheltered waterhole could be found. Their clothes, blotched and stained by the jail-cell filth, offended their olfactories as the sun grew warmer and the swamp moisture soaked in.
The spot Slayton picked was obscured from sight by low-hanging trees, surrounded on all sides by a thicket of dense brush. They stripped down and enjoyed the cool, murky water.
“Do you suppose we could hide out here until they pass through this area?” suggested Wilma, sitting in water up to her navel.
Slayton was doubtful. “They’ll plow right through the middle of where we’re sitting. See, they are on a maneuver, a guerrilla warfare practice run, and we’re the prize. You have to understand that they’re trained to move easily in this environment; the tactics they employ require that you and I respond in the most violent terms.’
“I’ve never been able to appreciate your talent for re maining so unemotional while the world is crumbling around you.”
“I’m just being realistic. We have to adapt to the environment, we have to lose the illusion that we are civilized. This swamp determines our survival. We must use its resources to defend ourselves. I think we should move up-river and build a few traps, to help ease the competition.”
Wilma stared hard at the trees. Something slithered over her toes, the sensation creeping up her spine. “Ben, are there any creatures in this water?”
“Some snakes. Water mocassins are deadly.”
“Something just touched me.”
“If it were a moccassin, you’d be a tad more upset than you are now.”
They managed to stay about twenty minutes ahead of the posse. The low-flying helicopter passed over once, but its extreme noise made early detection easy, allowing Slayton and Wilma to hide by the time it reached them.
Three traps were set. The first stretched over a soft embankment that Slayton gave an extra seven inches of surface area, mostly mud and sticks and rocks. It bordered one si
de of a pond housing a large, alligator. When an enterprising Brigader took that last step onto the false bank, both of his legs were chewed off before his comrades rescue him.
At one end of a small pasture, Slayton dropped broken shrubs and ferns over a grassy knoll which, on its far side, dropped into a muddy quagmire twelve feet deep. Two soldiers were swallowed up.
Wilma devised the third snare, a flimsy wooden bridge (made from assorted tree branches tied in bunches with kindling branches), rigged to break in half and plunge any number of Brigaders into a small pond chock full of water mocassins.
She discovered the snakes, ten in all, floating aimlessly in the pool. After tying down the final section of the span, she decided to cut away the nearby brush, to give the appearance of a path leading up to and away from it. Tugging on one stubborn tree, she and Slayton pulled out its roots prematurely, both of them rolling into the pond.
Slayton landed nearest the snakes, but he had only one hand in the water. Wilma’s head submerged underwater briefly, activating the quick, darting snakes. Her mouth opened to scream, but mud and water flowed in, forcing her to cough, reeling and splashing in an attempt to crawl out upside-down.
His reflexes were well-greased from the chores of the day. Flying to his feet, Slatyon bounded to the pool’s other side, where Wilma struggled in vain. The mocassins closed in on her exposed head. Slayton latched onto the belt on her bluejeans and yanked her up and out of the water. She landed in the damp mud with a dull thud, getting the wind punched out of her.
The snakes had been a shock, and she exclaimed, a bit shrilly, “What luck! Whoever steps in there will get the shit scared out of them.” Her forced humor hid the queasy realization of just how close she had come to death herself.
“Whoever crosses that bridge next,” said Slayton, “will not have me to pull him out.”
Despite the filth, the warmth in Wilma’s sudden embrace was genuine. It seemed to bring an unsettling calm over Slayton.
She had seen this particular expression cross his face only once before, when he had described to her how he had logged hours next to a hospital bed, watching his wife edge closer to death, a piece at a time, feeling ’helpless and impotent to halt the inevitable. Jean Marie’s malady had been irreversibly fatal. Nothing could be done. The experience still haunted Slayton.
“Listen,” he said abruptly. “I may not get a time-out like this one again. A minute from now we might have company, but for the moment, we’re safe. I have to say this now, in case we don’t make it.”
The mocassins writhed and splashed in the pool nearby.
“I swore that when Jean Marie died I’d never let another woman into my life. I was determined to make the entire sex pay for my loss. But surviving the next few hours means we’ll rack up too many points to stay just casual friends.” He laughed, grimly. “We gotta cut more time out from work to be together, lady.”
It was a bit of a letdown for Wilma, who had expected a major pronouncement. But in an instant she realized that for Ben to let his shield down even enough to make such an admission was a major development. Ben Slayton just did not get more definite than this.
She decided to tread carefully. “What we have is already more than casual, Ben. How about we discuss it over dinner—after we get our asses home?”
He nodded. “It’s a date, then.” He turned and seemed to sniff the air. “Airstrip’s north of here, if the sun serves me.” The touchy topic was closed off in that moment. He led, and they both began slogging in the direction indicated. It would be too simple to nail them on the open main highway, even if they lucked out and hitched a ride with some farmer headed for Morgan City. From a dis
tance they watched the Brigade chopper cover the road in efficient sweeps. Sticking to the swamp made elementary sense.
But The Brigade would know that, too.
Bathurst’s men had already blocked the bayou streams to the northwest, sweeping across Slayton’s eventual path.
It was Wilma who spotted the dinghy, heading toward their position. Four Brigaders had carried the boat to the isolated tributary, cut off from any navigable inlets, and were now engaged in hacking away a minor tangle of swamp grass and roots.
Wilma turned back to warn Slayton, but Ben had already seen the boat and melted into the swampland behind her. She kept carefully quiet and watched with horror as an alligator—that had to be what it was!--slithered wetly into the deeper water less than ten yards away. She jammed her fist into her mouth and hunkered down into the murky water herself. The slit-gold pupils, bobbing just above the muddy surface, seemed to regard her briefly before submerging in a flutter of dirty bubbles. They were sharing the pond.
“Alvarez! Hey! Over here!” Wilma nosed up out of the water to see the man called Biersto, facing away from her. “We got us one!” he shouted, and a pang of terror went quickly through her. Had Ben been caught?
She was hauled out of the pond by her hair, by the sentry who had crept up behind her while she was watching Biersto. It was Dax, the Middle Eastern thug, who grinned sickly and held her aloft like a trout.
“You can have the ear if you want it, Dax,” said Alvarez, sloshing over. “Don’t hurt her yet, though.”
“I ain’t interested in no goddam ear,” said Biersto, grabbing Wilma’s breast and twisting it till she shrieked.
“Hold, goddammit,” snapped Alvarez. “Save it.” He looked quickly around. “Hey, Slayton! You don’t want my man here to fuck your bitch to death, you better drag your balls out into the open!” He added, in a murmur, “… ’cause I’m gonna cut ’em off.”
From the swamp there was no reaction.
“Okay,” he hissed. “Drag her over to the sandbank, by the clearing there.” He perched an Uzi submachine gun on his hip, still looking around for Slayton. “Do whatever you want with her, but keep your eyes open.”
Wilma thrashed as Biersto and Dax strong-armed her. “Hey Alvarez, don’t you want a bite of this sweet piece?” said Dax, as Biersto dumped her on the ground and tried to tear her shirt off.
“Hell. I watched Karl Baal and that chick get it on last night. Who the hell needs a rerun of that horseshit?’
“Now, lookit, Alvarez, she likes people to watch,” said Biersto, parrying Wilma’s flurry of blows. “C’mon, bitch, fight me! You like it rough, don’t you!”
Suddenly Alvarez spotted movement in the spill of trees to his left. He circled warily and bolted the Uzi back into readiness.
He saw the violent, chomping motion of the ’gator gnashing something large. He squinted and saw Slayto ’s fatigue pants jerk spasmodically. He relaxed and grinned, watching the reptile savor its prize.
“Now ain’t that a shame,” he said to himself. He moved closer to watch, and do some savoring himself. The ’gator must have been at it a few minutes, he thought, because there did not seem to be any blood in the water. Mighty odd, that there wouldn’t be any blood.
Alvarez felt a prickle on the nape of his neck and then stiffened, watching the rusty bayonet blade slide forward out of his neck, from under his chin. His vocal equipment was neatly halved.
Slayton jerked the knife back, and Alvarez crumpled soundlessly. The alligator, catching the stink of fresh blood, wheeled around and began to plod toward the corpse.
Dax had Wilma’s shoulders crushed into the sand beneath his meaty knees. Biersto vised her feet down as Dax dropped his pants and began to force Wilma’s mouth open with his thumbs.
Wilma heard Biersto scream and watched the Uzi slugs tear across Dax’s chest from behind, spattering her with blood. The twitching bodies slumped across her in death, and she screamed. Dax and Biersto could now do nothing but leak into the sand.
She squirmed out from under them and saw Slayton standing knee-deep in the pond, holding the smoking Uzi and lacking his pants.
“Jesus Christ!” she yelled. “You took your fucking time about it!”
“Sorry I took so long. I had to strike a truce with one of our friends in
the animal kingdom.”
“God, yucch.” She wiped her lips convulsively, thankful for not having to experience Dax or Biersto.
Past them, in the swamp, the ’gator lunched happily on what was left of the bomb expert, Alvarez.
Using napalm charges and machetes, the Brigade men leveled a section of swamp to clear the area and perhaps flush Slayton out of hiding. Their advance was rapid and inexorable, like Sherman marching through Atlanta, and the best Slayton could hope for was a five-minute lead. He knew they could not be far from the airstrip.
Crouched low in the stolen dinghy, Slayton negotiated a narrow hairpin in the shallow water and docked against a fallen tree. There was more foliage here. After Wilma jumped to shore, he jammed the raft with his bayonet and hefted a rock into it. It sank in seconds.
They had been spotted already, from across the river.
“I can’t see how assassinating the President lets The Brigade just walk in and take over the government,” said Wilma, as they walked.
“It’s the fear syndrome, the shock of having him wasted on live television. They want panic, not control.” He wiped sweat and grime from his eyes. The mosquitos swarmed blackly about them despite the swamp water they both had rubbed on their skin to ward the insects off. “Each incidence of terrorism, of crude violence, helps fragment the public, to disorient them. If The Brigade actually issued demands, they’d never be met. They want to look like five or six different groups. The more people they look like, the less faith the public has in the government to protect innocent people from terrorists.”
“Did you find out how the assassination is supposed to come off?”
“If they pull it off, my guess would be that their hit man is already in Washington, undercover, probably has been for years. Surprise is Bathurst’s style.”
“Any way to verify that?”
“He’d have to be an American with an established identity: one that would allow him to move undetected through the politcial scene. Maybe an ex-Vietnam vet, if he’s loyal to The Brigade. Maybe a decorated soldier with access to the President.”