by Joe Gannon
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For Cornel Lagrouw, Doug Tweedale, Ian Walker, and Tim Coon. Compañeros, all, gone too soon, gone too soon.
And to the people of El Salvador, who deserve so much more.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction. All the events and characters have been invented by the author. But the rebel offensive of November 1989 is history, as were the murders of the six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers by the Salvadoran military, the terrible slaughter of the civil war in El Salvador, and the shameful role played by the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations in financing and prolonging the killings.
I’d like to thank Matt Rigney for his keen eye and insightful feedback (and occasional hand-holding). And Big Al Compagnon for his comments and time. Also, thanks to my editor, Elizabeth Lacks, at St. Martin’s Press for her patience, trust, and fabulous editorial eye. And my apologies to Laura and Justine for working through that magical weekend. I am indebted to those works of nonfiction that helped jog my memory, especially Joe Frazier’s El Salvador Could Be Like That, and Roy C. Boland’s Culture and Customs of El Salvador. And, of course, the poetry of Roque Dalton.
Once again the deep abyss, the old customs! What shall we do, then, with our laughter, with our freedom, with our morals based on anger?
—ROQUE DALTON, “THE PRODIGAL SON”
PROLOGUE
Las Vegas Salient, Nicaraguan-Honduran border, 1986
It is time to die.
Gladys Darío smiles at the thought. Smiles through the teeth she has managed to keep these past—what? Weeks, lifetimes? She does not clock time in seconds, but in footsteps. And she has counted them all: one thousand three hundred and thirty-three as her captor has come and gone—and come again. That’s how long she’s been held in her dark purgatory. Sweltering by day, shivering by night. Covered in bruises and bites and sores. Chained to the floor.
But no more.
It is time to die.
She can hear them all. Can hear everything. She is blind in the dark. Or maybe just blind. She does not, will not, even open her eyes anymore. Stopped opening them at step four hundred and sixty-eight. Accept the dark, refuse the light! Her ears are her eyes. And her hands. Like a mole she can read vibrations through her hands on the rough boards of the floor. The vibrations of every life form near her. But even moles have teeth that tear—and this time she will use those teeth to make him kill her.
But wait.… She hears, she feels, she sees … something is not right. It is not the steady tread of her tormentor she feels. There are many feet moving together. Something is wrong, like all of them being called to assembly. No. Scrambled. There is confusion in the vibrations she reads with her hands. Many feet pound up the hill to her cell, but his feet are not among them. They are coming for her. To kill her.
Goddamn it!
This is not the covenant she made with herself. She hasn’t yet gathered herself up. If they kill her now she won’t have gathered herself up. She broke herself into fragments those first few days—broke herself and scattered the parts about her miserable hut like jigsaw pieces from a forgotten box in an attic—or stars in the sky. No matter what her captor did, does, will do, he could only ever do it to a part of her, even a few parts, but never the whole. That—gathering herself whole—she saves for herself. That is her bargain—she’d save her teeth, save her life for as long as she could and when she no longer could she’d gather herself whole, use her teeth to make him stab her in the brain, and then die to the sounds of his screams.
And she will have won, because she has never uttered a sound—you can’t, not when you’re broken into one thousand three hundred and thirty-three pieces.
* * *
At first she believed she might be rescued, then hoped she might be exchanged. Then she just wanted to live. But her shame at accepting the unspeakable was tempered by the vow she made that she would end it all in death—his and hers.
His and Hers. Him and Her. Him. Them. Too many men!
Goddamn all men.
Except one. But why had he not come?
Her captor, the Contra commander Krill—the “notorious” Contra commander Krill. What does that even mean? Notorious? Scares the shit out of everyone is what it means. Well, almost everyone. Krill—who’d carried her so gently, so attentively for five days through the Nicaraguan mountains to his base in Honduras one thousand three hundred and thirty-three steps ago—he had come. Came. And would keep on coming. She knows she is a great prize to Krill. Not as a prisoner of war—Gladys is, after all, a lowly lieutenant of police in Nicaragua’s revolutionary government. But as an upper-class, white-skinned ladina from the kind of family Krill’s mother and sisters and aunts would’ve cleaned house for? That, she knows, is her real worth. That’s why Krill hasn’t shared his spoils with the rest of his mercenaries. And that is why she has known a prisoner exchange was not an option. At least not before it is time to gather her pieces together and die.
Still, she has prayed for a rescue.
Insane, of course. Like all miracles are an insanity. Yet we pray fervently for them. And Gladys has prayed for hers. In her mind she’s carved a small statue of Saint Ajax—patron saint of prisoners and sex slaves—and set him in a niche and prayed for salvation. Prayed as desperately as some campesino—watching his crops die of thirst and his children die of hunger—will pray to whatever old god or new saint might save them from despair and death. Yet all the while eyeing the spade he will bury them with.
So she has prayed as desperately, and as uselessly. But she has no spade, only teeth.
Silly, silly girl.
Captain Ajax Montoya, partner, mentor, friend, has not come. And now they are coming for her. He is probably just as dead as she soon will be anyways. The last time she’d seen Ajax during the firefight with Krill in Nicaragua he’d been trying to swap his life for hers. If she is here, then he is dead.
It is time to die.
They are close now, the many feet, too hurried. Could they be under attack?
The door bursts open, light stabs her eyes, even with them closed. They grab her, cut the ropes, loose the chains, and stand her up. Her legs won’t hold her and she collapses.
“Fuck you, I ain’t walking.”
Bravado is all she has left. But they are the first words she’s spoken and her voice is a croak so corrupted she barely understands herself. Then blackness once again as one of the Contras pulls a bag over her head. She is half dragged, half carried down a trail. Down. She knows she’s been kept atop a small hill, above the main camp. When she’d cared about her surroundings she’d noticed a kind of parade ground below her where the Contra drilled and turned out for VIPs. They’re carrying her to the parade ground. So that’s it—a public execution in full view of them all.
She tries to pull all her pieces back together, be whole for her death. But the ache in her limbs, the speed with which they carry her along, leaves bits of her trailing beh
ind like the tail of a comet. She collapses in a heap, stalling for time, but her escorts scoop her up and bear her along like a casualty from the battlefield.
Goddamn they’re in a hurry.
The angle they carry her at flattens out as they reach the parade ground. The Contras stand her up.
“You must walk.”
It is a woman’s voice. Gladys has known there were other women in the camp, had felt their vibrations through the boards of her cell.
“Are you a prisoner?” Gladys whispers.
The woman blows through her lips. “Commando.”
Commando is what the Contra call themselves because CIA mercenary has the virtue of precision but no dignity.
“Then you’re a stupid bitch,” Gladys croaks.
The woman hisses but there is no blow. Instead, something is thrust into Gladys’s hands. Sunglasses? She puts them on as the hood is ripped off. Light stabs her eyes again around the edges of the darkened lenses. Gladys cups her hands around them and looks at the ground. She can count four escorts, all women. And none of them is armed. She steals glances around the parade ground—a pasture field cleared of its trees where stumps stand like pedestals awaiting sculptures. The field is empty of troops, but she feels eyes on her and looks behind, where, at the tree line up the hill, she can see scores, maybe hundreds of Contras standing silent and still. Watching.
But no firing squad.
In front of her, ten yards away, a vehicle idles in the sunshine. She recognizes it as one of those big-ass Jeep Wagoneers with smoke-blacked windows the American diplomats use in Managua. This one is yellow and white, like a golden palomino. But out here on the empty field it reminds Gladys of a hippo in a waddle—fat, almost silly, but dangerous too.
All the more dangerous as Krill stands next to it. Almost at attention, dressed in tiger-stripe fatigues, a bush hat pulled low on his head. Also unarmed.
One of her escorts pushes her. “Walk.”
Gladys takes a few steadying breaths, and then a step. Her legs are wobbly, drunken. But she manages to get one foot in front of the other. Krill’s eyes seem to want to burn a hole in her forehead, but she stares only at the Wagoneer’s windows and makes as straight a line as she can. When she is a few feet away the windows slide down.
She stops.
Three men inside. Two in the backseat, the one next to the window is in uniform, one star on his shoulder. The driver is in civvies, light skinned, like a gringo. The third man she cannot see well. It is this man who speaks.
“Can you drive?”
A surge of electricity jolts her. She clamps her teeth and her body quakes as all those pieces she’s broken into gather inside of her, enter through her coccyx, up her spinal cord, and reassemble in her brain. Reassemble her being.
That voice. That face. She did recognize the third man but her brain refused to acknowledge it until she was made whole. It is Ajax.
Captain Ajax Montoya.
Saint Ajax.
Holding a hand grenade.
“Gladys. Can you drive?”
When her body stops trembling she turns her head and looks Krill dead in his black eyes, which are too large for his small face. It is only because of the sunglasses that she can do so. He seems ready to explode in rage or implode in despair.
“I can drive,” she croaks.
“Get in.”
The gringo in the front slides over the gearshift into the passenger seat. Gladys gets behind the wheel. She finds Ajax’s smiling face in the rearview mirror. He is thinner, darker, and hairier than when they’d parted. She figures he’s been in the bush some weeks staking out Krill’s camp. But the smile on his face is all Ajax—cocky and smug—suicidally so, given their circumstances. She sees that the grenade in his right hand has the pin out. In his left hand he has the Needle—that wicked blade!—pressed to the general’s throat.
“This is General Alfredo Alvarez, commander of the much-maligned military intelligence of the even more maligned Honduran armed forces. Our friend next to you is John Joseph Cahill. His diplomatic passport says he’s a cultural attaché at the U.S. embassy.”
Gladys looks Cahill over—brown/brown, five-ten, one seventy-five, mid-forties, in good shape but going paunchy in the middle.
“La Cia.”
“I am not CIA,” Cahill objects, but with little conviction.
“’Course if you said otherwise you’d have to kill yourself.” Ajax gives Gladys a wink, then he presses the Needle against the general’s throat. “Remind him.”
“Krill!”
Gladys watches Krill in the side-view mirror. He trembles with rage at the general’s call.
“Si, mi general.”
“You will not impede our leaving, nor pursue us, nor interfere in any way. If we are hurt or killed because of your actions, in the morning helicopter gunships will drive your people over the border where my colleagues will make sure the Sandinista Army is waiting for you. Understood?”
Gladys watches Krill’s shrunken reflection in the mirror—his diminished size the only reason she can look. She knows Krill despises the Hondurans, and the gringos, even his CIA patrons who make his war possible. He told her the story many times, usually while unbuckling his belt: the shoeless, mestizo peasant who left generations of poverty behind by joining the Ogre’s National Guard where he’d risen to the implausibly lofty rank of sargento. Krill had fought the Sandinistas to the bitter end, barely escaped after the dictator and his officers had fled. Not long afterward he’d been picked up and dusted off by the gringos and their cowboy president, Ronald Reagan. Now there is no dictator, no officers. Krill is the name spoken and feared. He is head of a thousand troops. The elite of the Contra army. And he despises all those who’ve made it so.
Krill ignores the general, leans in, and smiles at Ajax.
“You.”
“Me.”
“You have got the biggest balls of anyone I know.”
“Do as your master says, dog. Or I’ll kill them both.”
Krill catches Gladys’s eyes in the mirror. She flinches, looks away, and curses herself for it.
“Take care of my angelita. I will see you both again.”
Ajax sheaths the Needle. “Only if I wake you to witness your own death, pendejo.”
Ajax raises the window on Krill. Gladys does the same, and the face of her tormentor disappears behind the tint. Out of sight. She knows he will never be out of mind. She turns to the backseat.
“Kill him, Ajax.”
“Can’t do it, Gladys. It was them dead or you alive. That was the deal. Make some distance from here.”
Gladys puts the big Wagoneer in gear and drives off, but she doubts the distance will ever be too great.
* * *
She gets about five miles, the Contra camp long gone in the rearview mirror when the spasms overtake her. She slows to a stop before losing control. Ajax puts the pin back in the grenade, cuffs his hostages, and lays her down in the back of the Wagoneer. He puts the general behind the wheel and they are back on the road in no time. Soon enough she feels the hum of paved road under the wheels.
But she is still rocked by the spasms.
“I’m sorry, Ajax. Can’t control it.”
His rough hand strokes her face. “Don’t worry, you’re in shock.”
“How do I look?”
He shrugs. “Skinnier than ever. But your hair’s grown out. Not so butch. I kind of like it. Drink this.”
He holds a vial to her lips.
“What is it?”
“Stop the shakes.”
Gladys sips down the bitter elixir. It is hardly settled in her stomach when she realizes it is pushing her over the edge into unconsciousness.
“Ajax … what … what…?”
“Shh.” His hand rubs her forehead and settles on her cheek. “You’re gonna sleep a good long while now. And when you wake up, you’ll be safe.”
“No…”
“Yes. Part of the deal.”
&nbs
p; * * *
Hours and hours later Gladys awakens, thinking at first it was all a dream and she is still chained to the floor of her cell. She finds, instead, that she is strapped to a gurney on a medevac jet, miles above the Caribbean and only an hour from Miami, where, she will find out three hours later, her family awaits her.
But she is alone. Ajax is not there.
That, too, is part of the deal.
1
El Salvador, October 1989
Maybe it was a sign of the times. Maybe it was the end times. Kiki didn’t know. The major often spoke of it—the end of history—but he was a very advanced man, always thinking about the big picture. Kiki did a job at a time, partied afterward, then waited for the next one. His was a near-perfect world—he had money, pussy, and impunity. Kiki adjusted the headphones on his new Walkman and rolled the volume knob to its end. When he pressed play he could feel the wheels engage the cassette as the tape turned. Guitars and cymbals crashing in harmony, then the sirens and drums. Kiki waited until his head bobbed in rhythm, until he felt his purpose align with the music. He held his bat, El Grillo, slung low over his belly and waited for the licks he loved to finger best. It was a gift from the major, not a baseball bat, but an English cricket, grillo. The major insisted it was a better tool, easier on the bones, but tougher on the muscles. Kiki liked it as it made a much better guitar, the flat business side made for excellent strumming while his fingers flew over the pretend frets. Still, it bothered Kiki to no end. Nineteen eighty-nine was almost over and Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood was stuck at #79 for album of the year.
Number seventy-nine!!
He tucked his lower lip under his teeth and wailed all the more on El Grillo. Fucking gringos! he shouted in his mind to be heard over the title track. What did they know! They’re up north in all their millions, with all their millions buying who? Billy Joel? Paul McCartney? Queen! Fucking Queen! QUEEN?!?! Kiki felt the helplessness stir—everyone in El Salvador could buy five Mötley Crüe’s and it was nothing compared to the endless rivers of indolent Americans who never stopped shopping. And their dollars decided the fate of the world. And they would give it all to Freddie Mercury.