“Yes, you do. The last time Howie King was seen by anyone was leaving his apartment building in New York in the company of yourself, a general, and a couple of other men I presume were White House assistants.”
“How do you know that?”
“Where is King? At Camp David?”
“I’ve no idea. Our visit with him was brief. It had to do with national security. We were thinking of using the man as a double for the president until this period of danger is over, but it didn’t work out. He doesn’t really resemble President Hampton at all.”
Dresden struck Callister hard across the mouth with the pistol, causing him to fall to the floor. He lay there, staring upward in fear and hatred, blood flowing from his rapidly swelling lip. Charley knelt over him and placed the gun’s muzzle directly between Callister’s eyes.
“You don’t seem to understand how serious I am about this,” Charley said. “I’m wanted for two murders in California, as you probably know.”
“Don’t know. Don’t know anything about you.”
“Like hell you don’t.” Charley pressed the muzzle hard against the bridge of the other’s nose. “I didn’t kill anyone, as you also must know. But I’m willing to do so now. It’s all the same to the police. Those two people were dear friends of mine. They’ve got some biblical justice coming.”
“Biblical …?”
“Damn you! Answer me! Is Howie King at Camp David?”
“Yes.” Callister’s speech was slightly slurred from his injury.
“He’s an impressionist, a professional imitator. You’ve been using him to simulate the president’s voice. It’s actually been King speaking in those telephone conversations, those radio broadcasts. You’ve dubbed his voice onto old videotapes of Hampton and passed it off as the real thing. Isn’t that so?” He pulled back the hammer of the revolver.
“Yes.”
“And the president is really dead, isn’t he?”
“No.”
“Damn it, Callister! A straight answer!”
“He was alive last time I saw him. That’s the truth.”
“When was that?”
“Weeks ago. After the shooting.”
Dresden paused. William McKinley and James Garfield had been mortally wounded, but both had lingered for some time. Hampton may not have died instantly. But surely he was dead now. King’s continuing performance attested to that. Dresden got to his feet. “I think you’re lying about the president,” he said. “But I have what I want.”
Callister sat up, rubbing his mouth.
“I’ll deny all of this,” he said. “No one will believe you.”
“Are you David Callister, the columnist?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you for saying so. Now you won’t be able to deny anything.”
Callister looked at Maddy and then at her purse.
“You have this on tape.”
“Of course.”
“You won’t get away with it. You’ve committed at least three felonies coming in here tonight. I’ll have the police on you the instant you leave this house. I’ll claim the tape as property you stole.”
“I grew up here. I know ways out of this county the police would never dream of.”
“Who are you?”
“If you truly don’t know, Mr. Callister, I’m sure there are people at Camp David right now who can tell you.”
Callister looked again at Maddy. “You’ve ruined your husband’s career.”
“There are a lot of careers that are going to be ruined before this is over,” Charley said. “Including yours. Mrs. Atherton lost more than a career.”
“We had nothing to do with that.”
“That can be debated at some other time, maybe before a congressional investigating committee.” Dresden returned the heavy pistol to his belt. “We’re going to leave now, Callister. Fast. I suggest you sit here quietly for a while. Think very carefully about what you do after we go out that door.”
Once in the car, as they sped down a back road toward the Connecticut line and the Merritt Parkway, Maddy began to cry. “Why did you have to hit him like that, Charley?”
“So he’d take me seriously. Really seriously. He did.”
“But you were so vicious. That gun. God, what have you gotten me mixed up in?”
“Maddy, the whole country’s mixed up in this. Do I have to say it again? Mrs. Atherton didn’t get off with a pistol whipping. My friend Charlene is very dead.”
Her crying ceased, but apparently not her tears. She kept wiping her eyes with the back of her glove.
“I’m scared, Charley. I’ve never been this scared.”
“Play the tape back. I want to make sure we got everything. We’ve been lucky so far, but my luck has lately developed a habit of running out on me.”
“Will the police be after us?”
“He won’t call them.”
“You’re sure?”
“Callister’s friends will come after us, all right. Don’t worry about that. And when they do it won’t be with the police. My hope is that by then we’ll be safely in the Vice President’s House.”
“You’ve got us all in the same boat with you now, don’t you? Me. George. And soon the vice president.”
“It’s not my boat.”
He drove on. He offered her no words of comfort. She’d made her choice, just as he’d made his. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. It was going to be anything but that, as she would have to make herself understand.
When the call finally came for the trip to Barra Mono, it was from Sandoval. He met Kreski in the lobby of the high-rise before sunrise the next morning and drove him up to the airport, proceeding on to the military side of the field and halting near a small helicopter parked slightly apart from a long row of others. It was painted olive drab, but bore no markings whatsoever. Sandoval did not get out of the car.
“There’s your machine, Señor Kreski. I have business in Tegucigalpa today and won’t be coming with you. He is a good pilot. You will be in good hands. You should be back tomorrow. I will see you then. Buen viaje!”
They shook hands with much macho firmness, brother veterans of combat now. Kreski took up his small canvas bag and hurried toward the little helicopter, whose pilot swung open the door for him. He was wearing a flight helmet, but Kreski recognized him immediately. He was the American who had been with them on the trip to Ahuancha, the killer in the beret, the “merc.”
“Put this on,” he said, handing Kreski another helmet. “Plug in the mike and we can talk on the intercom. Let loose of the mike button when you’re through talking or you won’t be able to hear a fucking thing I say.”
“I’ve used radios before.”
“Yeah. I guess you have.”
As Kreski adjusted the helmet and fastened his seat belt, the other man started the engine with a whine that quickly grew into a muffled, shuddering roar. With a slight movement of his hand, he lifted the helicopter several feet off the ground, spoke a few words into the microphone to the military air controller, then tipped the small aircraft forward slightly and began a swift climb into the emerging sunlight in the east, following a course over the city. It was one of the few times of the day one could see the mountains around Tegucigalpa, their tops clearly etched against the sky. In an hour or so they would be lost in the haze and smog of automobile exhaust.
“What kind of helicopter is this?” Kreski asked. “I’ve never seen one before. They didn’t have any around when I was down here with the president.”
“It’s an OH-Six. In Nam we called them the LOCH, light observation combat helicopter. They manufacture them now as the Hughes Five Hundred. You can get two of them into a C-One-three-one. Can fly them onto an enemy field, offload them and attach the rotors, and have them in combat in sixty seconds. They’re great shit for clearing airfield perimeters. They carry a forward-firing chain gun and two rocket racks. We used them in ’Nada in eighty-three.”
“What are they used for down here?�
��
“Everything from road interdiction to bomb drops to nightstalker black jobs. You know, ‘training missions.’” He grinned.
“Does this one belong to the U.S. military or Peter Ashley Brookes?”
The man ceased grinning. “Ain’t saying.”
“I’ve figured out who you are.”
“I would have thought you’d done that right off. The fucking libs have dragged my ass up to Congress enough times to testify about our activities.”
“You’re Mason Barren, editor of Mercenary Magazine.”
“Managing editor. And I go by Mace Barren. You should know that. I’m sure you guys got a sheet on me.”
“As a matter of fact, I was reading it just a few weeks ago. Born 1938, Rawlins, Wyoming …”
“It was 1939.”
“Worked as a truck driver, strip-mine dynamiter, Forest Service fire fighter. Drafted in 1962, went through OCS, joined the Special Forces, served in Panama, did two tours in Vietnam, never got above the rank of captain.”
“Wrongo. Last tour I held the temporary rank of major. Lost it when I quit the army eight years short of retirement.”
They were well east of the city, following a river that wound alongside the slopes of Honduras’ central plateau. The sun had risen high enough to brighten all the ground below them. Barren tapped one of his instruments, then leaned back again, glancing about the skies around him in the manner of a World War I fighter pilot.
“Then you became a free-lancer in South Florida, working with anti-Castro Cubans. Then you disappeared for a while.”
“I went to ’Gola. No big thing. Worked with Savimbi. You know, ‘training.’”
“How did you get into ‘journalism’?”
“I tried writing books, but I couldn’t get anyone to publish them. Too right wing. Too gory. I finally had one published myself. Mr. Brookes didn’t think it was too right wing, or too gory.”
“You boasted once you’d probably killed more than a hundred men.”
“I never said that. I said fifty. No Americans.”
They lapsed into silence, which Barren seemed to prefer. In the gathering heat of the increasing sunlight, Kreski found himself dozing. At length, he slept.
He awakened to hear Barren’s voice in his earphones, swearing. “Look at all this shit. Might as well be back at Fort Bragg.”
They were still by the plateau, but the terrain was descending, and the green of the coastal plain was visible in the hazy distance ahead. Barren, however, was looking out the side window, straight down. Shading his eyes, Kreski did the same on his side.
Everything was camouflaged, but they were flying at an altitude low enough for much of it to be visible. Acres of army tents. Clusters of trucks, “Hummer” combat terrain vehicles, armored personnel carriers, light tanks, rocket launchers, missile launchers, radars, antiaircraft gun emplacements. In a long nearby clearing, Kreski could even see the outlines of a few combat fighters. There were doubtless more hidden from view.
“There was hardly any of this around on the presidential visit,” he said.
“Yeah, there was. They just kept you away from most of it because of all the fucking press you had with you.”
“To what point? The American public has a pretty good idea of what’s happening down here. TV and newspapers have been full of it for months. They know how many Americans have been lost, almost as many as in Lebanon.”
“They don’t know shit.”
“They know there’s a war.”
“Don’t I wish. Mister, there’s been a ‘continuous joint training exercise’ with the Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Costa Ricans going on ever since the El Salvadoran government fell—nearly two fucking years. There’s been one kind of training exercise or another going on since early in the Reagan administration. In the last fourteen months we’ve put enough conventional force into this sector to wipe the ass of the ’Nistas all the way to Managua.”
“Sandinistas?”
“I call them ’Nistas. The Contras call them ‘Compas’—short for Compañeros; that’s like ‘comrades.’ They also call them an Indian name, Perros quacos. Mad dogs.”
“There are mad dogs on your side—our side.”
“There are mad dogs in all those skunk works around the Pentagon too. We’ve got gunships that can put a cannon round in every square yard of a football field quicker than a man can run across it. We used them in ’Nada. You should have seen the piles of chopped-up feet. We’ve got gas bombs that spread an explosive cloud over an area bigger than a city block that go off with enough implosive force to suck the lungs out of a ’Nista’s nose. We’ve got antipersonnel grenades that fire hundreds of plastic flechettes that can dig into a man’s guts without ever showing up in an X-ray. We’ve got two combat divisions, every kind of commando and black job unit imaginable, all kinds of tac air, and two naval task forces. We could win a war here in a week. All Hampton has to do is give the word and the ’Nistas disappear. But he’s refused to do it, and ever since he got shot up everyone down here’s been sitting on his ass. We haven’t had a single decent combat action—black job, free-lance, nothing. The Pentagon even has a hold on cross border recon. But I tell you, one coded message from the Pentagon war room and the ’Nistas are piles of raw meat.”
“What about the Cubans?”
“They’re already here. They were in ’Gola. They were in ’Nada. No big shit.”
“What about the Russians?”
“They were in Nam. They were in Laos. They were in fucking Korea. No big shit. They’re what we’re fighting. That’s why we’re here.”
Now it was Kreski who preferred silence. He saw uniformed men moving about the ground, many of them turning to watch them pass overhead, but without alarm. A question should have occurred to him many miles before.
“How is it we can overfly all these installations with such impunity?” he asked.
“Got clearance radioed ahead,” said Barren. “And we’re flying a prescribed course.”
“How do you get this kind of clearance as a magazine editor?”
“I’m part of the team. I’m a lieutenant colonel in the Alabama National Guard.”
“Are you from Alabama?”
Barren turned and grinned again. “Hell no.”
They had been following the steep-sided valley of what Barren identified as the Patuca River. Without warning, he made a sharp turn to the right and began climbing to skirt the top of a high ridge that blocked their way to the south. He crossed at a shallow saddle, descending the long slope beyond into a lush, green valley. A twisting path among the trees ahead proved to be a wide river.
“This is the Coco,” Barren said, as the helicopter chattered across it. “Welcome to Nicaragua.”
“What?”
Barren said nothing more. He was busy. Dropping the chopper to treetop level, he flew a zigzag course parallel to the river, veered off to the right until he was over a dirt road, and followed it at red-line speed among flashes of gunfire from the ground until he was roaring along the main street of a town. The central square quickly appeared, a military vehicle of some sort parked next to it. Barren fired off a few rounds from the chain gun with indeterminate effect, then lifted over a rooftop and fled the area by the most direct route possible, crossing the river shortly after.
“Just got the urge,” he said. “That town was Balana. Never liked the place.” He turned the helicopter back north toward the ridge line. “Don’t tell anyone. I might lose my commission in the Alabama Guard.”
This time he stayed to the south of the ridge, which quickly grew into a range of mountains—the Montañas de Colon. The only diversion he made after that was to turn south briefly on another road, sweeping over a procession of a few dozen people and pack animals, moving slowly up from the border. They looked up at the helicopter, but did not flee.
“Campesinos,” he said. “Probably okay. People have been leaving Nicaragua every day since the ’Nistas took over. Sometimes ther
e’s a ’Nista infiltrator with them, but there’s no use wasting ’em just for that.”
Lifting the machine once more, he set it on a compass heading for the northeast, and kept it there. The mountains at length slid away to the left, and the ensuing green flatness shortly afterward revealed a line of blueness on the horizon. It proved to be a wide bay, opening onto the sea.
“Laguna de Caratasca. This whole ‘exercise’ is ‘purple,’” Barren said, using the Pentagon term for a joint operation involving all the armed services, “but this here’s navy country. Swift boats, PVs, and landing craft in the bay. Destroyers and frigates off shore. And the USS Iowa task force on station in blue water. The ground perimeter’s held by the marines.”
“They know we’re coming?”
“Fucking A. Otherwise we’d be nothing more than a few pieces of burning flesh and aluminum in about five minutes. They know who you are. They know you’re no longer with the White House. You’ve got clearance because you’re listed with us, TDY.”
“Who are we going to see?”
“Any marine or navy intelligence officer who will talk to you. They got some good shit on Jalisco.” He paused to throttle back on the helicopter’s speed and speak a few words on the radio to someone on the ground. “Look, Kreski,” he said, coming back on the intercom. “I can answer any question you have about Jalisco, at least about his operations down here. But Mr. Brookes wants you to get everything from the straight official shit. So I’ll take you to it.”
They swept over the trees toward a cleared landing zone containing perhaps a dozen other helicopters, all with marine markings.
“Just keep this in mind, Kreski,” Barren said, settling the machine onto the ground in a great cloud of flying dust. “As long as you’re in country, you are with us. That means especially me, Sandoval, or Victores. You ain’t no longer a Fed.”
“Understood,” Kreski said.
A jeep driven by a marine lance corporal jounced them up a road to a gathering of camouflaged tents, halting before one of the smaller ones. Barren led them inside, past two enlisted men working at typewriters, and up to a desk where a marine major in combat fatigues with rolled up sleeves was sitting behind a table piled with paperwork. Except for mosquito netting, the sides of the tent had been rolled up to reveal the trees and tents around them. There was a vague breeze from the sea.
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