The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  He could hear the shouting over the explosions and the shooting. The officers trying to gain control in confusion. He waited and he watched. He was fifty yards from the command building and seventy yards from the near corner of the dormitory building where the officers, in cover, were rallying frightened men. He wrenched the lever. The jet flew. Compressed petrol and oil arching forward. Gord pressed the ignition trigger.

  The fire swarmed forward.

  The fire caught at men who had been eating or resting, men who had been dreaming or washing their kit, men who had been reading or preparing to walk out into the town on the evening after market. Gord saw the fire catch at men, hold them, and he heard the screams of men who had been caught and held by the oil in the fuel. Moving now . . .

  Running with the cart for the protection of the wall where the garrison’s vehicles were parked. Stopping. Dragging forward the cart and squirting the black snake forward and then the fire leaping after it and finding the walls and windows and doors of the command building. He saw the silhouette of a man who tried to close steel shutters to a window and who was beaten back by the stream of flame. He hosed the command building . . . Running with the cart and throwing himself down in open ground and aiming the nozzle ahead and towards the low concrete structure without windows that would be the armoury. There was a gaggle of men, shouting in hysteria, at the door of the armoury, and one trying to insert the key into the padlock, and the race for them to open the door before the fire reached them. A lost race . . . Going with the cart, needing to hug shadows, searching for darkness. There was the shrill laughter of the Street Boy beside him. There was the whisper of the Academic’s prayer. There was the wheezed gasp of the Archaeologist’s oath.

  Gord ran for a new firing position.

  The two lorries were returning troops, on rotation, from Chajul to Nebaj.

  Had it not been for the weather, for the state of the road, the lorries would have been back in the garrison camp four hours before. There had been earth slips, rock falls, there had been a forty-foot-high conifer tree down across the road. The lorries had been crossing the plaza when the first mortar shell had hit the camp.

  The Priest saw it.

  He was a man of middle years and long experience of the triangle. Apart from nineteen months in Italy, studying in Perugia, and seven months in the Belgian theological centre at Louvain, he had spent the last thirteen years of his life in Nebaj. He had come to Nebaj to assist a Spanish Jesuit, shot dead on his bicycle on the road outside the town that led to the waterfall. He had worked with a German priest, fled from death threats. He had been his bishop’s man in the town until the bishop had closed the parish, too dangerous for the church to work. He had given last rites to thirteen women shot by the army in front of the church steps. To those who worshipped in his church he was a man not known to permit fear. He had taken that evening a cooked meal from the nuns at the Sisters of Charity orphanage, and shared laughter with them, and later it had been his intention to go again to the garrison camp to continue his protest at the health of coffee finca workers, who, it was his belief, had been systematically poisoned by the insecticides sprayed from aircraft. He had a file in his lodgings behind the church of the death threats that he received, and he liked to show the file to foreign visitors, bishops from Europe and aid workers and television crews. The Priest came from one of the cobbled narrow streets near the plaza.

  The gunfire whipped the plaza. Market night, and the trading done, and the money gathered, and the drink started. Men and women and children scattering in panic. The rabble army ducking and firing, weaving and firing. The soldiers in cover beside the high wheels of their lorries.

  They ran for the church doors. They abandoned their stalls and their drink, they dropped their food. The marimba music died. The fear rush for the doors of the church.

  Where the Priest watched from, the corner of the plaza, an officer crawled up the steps of the church and, arm raised to get better distance, threw two grenades through the open door.

  He had seen it, the grenades rolled into the church door, and the soldiers had fled. They were cut off from the camp, they scattered into the town.

  The sheet had been ripped and tied to a broomstick. The sheet waved through the window at the end of the command building.

  Gord called Groucho to him. The men were to stop firing, they were to stay down and not to show themselves. ‘Tell them that we recognize the flag of surrender. Surrender is unconditional. They are to come out unarmed and with their hands up. They are to come to the football pitch and they are to sit down. They will not be harmed . . . Tell them that.’

  It was a dribble at first, and then a spurt. A river of men walked through the rain towards the football pitch, and there were others who were helped and some who were carried.

  The senior officer was a tall man with dishevelled hair and he wore a silk dressing gown that was open to his body and the singlet and underpants, and his boots were unlaced. Perhaps he had been about to take a shower when the first mortar bomb had exploded, or perhaps he had been changing before his dinner. The senior officer, alone, ignored the stream of men who went under the cover of the rifle and machine-gun barrels to the football pitch, and walked to the shadow darkness where Gord crouched beside Groucho. The senior officer stood in front of them. His shape was thrown forward across them by the flame light. A neatly trimmed moustache, and half-glasses that were askew. Gord thought the man had dignity.

  Groucho’s hesitant question, and the senior officer replied, curt, ‘Yes, I speak English.’

  Gord pushed himself upright. ‘The surrender is unconditional, do you understand, sir?’

  ‘My men refuse to fight . . . you are a mercenary?’

  ‘I asked you, sir, if you understood?’

  ‘My men refuse to face the fire . . . you are an agent of your government?’

  ‘Do you understand, sir, the terms of surrender?’

  The senior officer stared at him. He would have seen the hollowed eyes of tiredness and the caved cheeks of exhaustion, and the stubble on the cheeks and the black oil smears.

  ‘I understand them.’

  More shooting from the town, a long burst of automatic fire. Gord snapped the orders at Groucho. Men were to guard the prisoners, to escort the medical orderlies, to break into the armoury, to gather together food supplies.

  They walked down from the camp and past the guardhouse at the gate. They went through the old streets where the windows were shuttered, the doors closed, they went through the old streets where the Ladinos lived. The Fireman and the Academic pulled the cart that carried the flame thrower and the wheels squealed over the cobbles and the wheelbarrow was pushed behind them by the Street Boy, and the Archaeologist was beside him.

  The crowd pressed around him. He heard the murmur of a name. Women in bright-coloured blouses, girls in brilliant-red skirts, men with hope alive in their faces, pushing against him, touching his clothes and his body. The name was Gaspar, and the murmur had become a shout. He saw Jorge, beyond the crowd, near the swinging body of an officer, who stared down at him from the church steps. He shouted to Jorge that he should make his speech, draw in his recruits. The crowd grew around him, groping to feel him, calling the name of Gaspar. He saw Zeppo, swaying helpless in the crush, carried along, and could not read his face. He shouted to Zeppo that he should make his way, fastest, to the camp, help with the sorting of supplies. He told Groucho that he wanted to move by midnight, that Groucho should escort the prisoners from the hotel and the senior officer back to the camp. He was Gaspar, he was the spirit of the legend. The blood ran in him. The tiredness and the exhaustion were gone from him. Men reached to grasp his hand, women lifted their small children so they could gaze into his face. He stood near to a wall and the sound of the name beat in his ear. In an entry behind him the Fireman was helped by the Academic to refill the tubes of the flame thrower. There was the smell, acrid, of the thick oil and the hiss, sharp, of the air cylinder. The name was a
ferment around him. A button was pulled from his tunic, as if it were a token, and fell to the ground, and men and women and children scrabbled for the prize . . .

  The Archaeologist tugged at his sleeve, pushed back an old man without teeth. Foul breath and the whined call of ‘Gaspar’.

  ‘You have to sleep, Gord.’

  ‘We don’t have the time to sleep.’

  ‘You can’t do it all yourself.’

  ‘When I don’t, no-one else does.’

  ‘That’s arrogance, Gord . . .’

  He had a full head of hair, almost white now.

  He wore a well-cut toothbrush of a moustache.

  Percy Martins was finely built for his years. He could easily have carried for himself the grip bag and the tackle box and the sleeve for the rods. One of the old guard from front desk trailed Martins along the corridor, bearing his burden.

  A day’s fishing, midweek, was not unusual now for him.

  Two young men, their jackets already discarded in their offices, ducked their heads to him, and right that they should show some bloody respect. A young woman, carrying a wrapped sandwich and a closed polystyrene coffee beaker, glowered at him, would have been of the new intake that was provincial and force-fed with education, but stepped out of his way.

  He clumped into his outer office, past the bat who was now his secretary, not for long . . . unlocked the door of his small room and smiled sweetly as the man stacked his bag and his box and his rods in the corner.

  His secretary brought through the signal, passed on by North American Desk.

  . . . Bloody people in Washington. Bloody Americans.

  Too much shit taken from the Americans, too much rolling over like a whipped cur, tail across the privates . . .

  He reached for his telephone, dialled the internal number of North American Desk.

  ‘. . . You’re level with me. Five had a name, right? We helped Five, right? No Further Action, right? Thank you . . .’

  Percy Martins would have considered himself armourplated if it came to inter-departmental argument. He was one of the few remaining of the former men of the Secret Intelligence Service. He had survived, comfortably, the weeding-out process of the new Director General. He had, now, no specific designation, no stated responsibility. He occupied an office that was flanked by Personnel (Records) and Expenditure (In House), on the fourth floor of the new building by Vauxhall Bridge; if he craned from his window, pressed his nose against the glass that could not be opened, he could just see the river. Bits and pieces came his way, things no-one else could pigeonhole, but not too many.

  There had been so many who had been cleared out with the move. A scandal. Too many for the formality of even the briefest leaving parties. An utter scandal. Good men, more than twenty years’ service in, and let go on a Friday afternoon with a brown envelope on internal delivery issuing them with fifty pounds of vouchers for the Army and Navy store. Not even a clock, not any more, not even a sherry decanter. Not for ‘Sniper’ Martins, oh, no, not yet . . . The young men and women, with their good degrees, eyed him in the corridors with suspicion and yet with envy because his achievement was still talked of, grudgingly. A marksman in the Beqa’a valley of the Lebanon, controlled by Percy Martins. The shooting of a Palestinian assassin, organized by Percy Martins. The presence in a former Prime Minister’s attic loft of a high-powered rifle, de-activated by Royal Ordnance, presented by Percy Martins. More than any of these Johnny wimps of today would achieve, a killing in the Beqa’a . . . The in-tray caught his eye, what the secretary bat had left there. He riffled the sheets of paper. There was his four-page digest, unrequested and written from his own initiative, on the need for closer monitoring of the nuclear warhead stockpile held in the Ukraine, his suggestion for a field agent to be put in; scrawled across the top sheet was ‘Better Left to Satellite Photography’, and then the spider initials of the head of Europe (East/Former USSR) Desk. Intolerable . . . Three stapled pages submitted to Near East (Iran) Desk, detailing the need to aid and arm and control from the sovereign base in Cyprus the Iranian dissidents operating inside mullah-land; ‘Thanks for your interest, will come back to you if relevant’. Disgraceful . . . Accounts wished to see him, personally; his expenses. Bloody cheek . . . The Deputy Director General regretted a full diary prevented the fixing of a meeting; a hands-on and meaningful future. Bastard . . . His position was secure, so they attempted death by a thousand cuts. Not his intention to make it easy for them.

  He walked out to his secretary. He chewed on a peppermint, spoke through it. ‘Over at Five there’s a creep called Hobbes, I want to see him, soonest . . .’

  ‘I have just had, Brennard, one of the most opinionated, self-satisfied, under-achieving creatures from Six in this office, not just lecturing me but pissing down at me from on high. I didn’t like it. Why am I covered in this piss . . . ? Because you, in your wisdom, wrote “No Further Action” on the matter of Brown, Gordon Benjamin. Brown, Gordon Benjamin, I think you called him “a total fool”, is currently leading a rebellion in Guatemala that could, if successful, destabilize the region. Ten out of nine for judgement, eh . . . and we just have a series of platitudes to tell us about him.’

  ‘What do we want . . . ?’

  ‘Not what we want, the Americans want this total fool dead in his tracks. We probably wouldn’t mind helping them . . . Trouble is that Brown, Gordon Benjamin, is our man and we know nothing of him. Am I getting there?’

  ‘What should I do, Mr Hobbes?’

  ‘I remember that before promotion out of the nursery, you used to run to Mother.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Very little is. Get Parker on it.’

  It was down by the bridge outside Nebaj that the front of the column met the flotsam refugees from Playa Grande. They came off a track that idled beside the river and Gord saw them as they stumbled and trudged clear of the trees. Children and women and older men, they meant little to him because he was still giving out the orders. Sometimes the orders had been given through Jorge, and sometimes when he could not find Jorge then he cracked those orders himself and left Groucho to translate for him. The orders covered the organization of the march, and who would go faster and scout ahead, and where in the column the machine guns should be carried, and where the food should be, and where the mortars, and where the medical supplies.

  He snapped the orders, because he had already been overruled by Harpo. Gord had said that women and children from Nebaj should not accompany the men recruited by Jorge’s speech from the church steps. Women and children from Nebaj would accompany the men, Harpo had said, because otherwise the men would not march. They were a winding column at the bridge, a flickering of torch lights in the darkness of early morning. He had not slept. He was moving forward, hurrying to gain the head of the column, when he saw the debris people of Playa Grande. He was surrounded by what had become his personal guard of the Fireman and the Academic and the Archaeologist and the Street Boy. When he had talked with Jorge, to choose the route of the march, Jorge had stayed silent and it had been Gord’s stabbing finger that had decided on the climb into the 9000 foot-high Cuchumatanes; he was too tired to care that he humbled the leader. He was moving forward, and always there was the obsession drive for speed. The rain was carried into his face by the wind that blustered between the trees by the bridge. His uniform was clinging to his body and he had no warmth left in his arms and chest and legs. The cart was dragged behind him, and the wheelbarrow was pushed behind the cart. He saw her . . . She was at the back of the group. A torch beam found her face then lost it, then found her again. A shrunken man leaned on her right arm, her left arm supported against her shoulder a sleeping child. The dog would have smelled him. The dog bounded forward. The dog’s tongue licked the grimness from his face. She came to him, and she let go of the man and she reached forward and with strength she dragged the dog back from him, as if the dog should not show affection to him.

  ‘So you took Nebaj?’

/>   ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how many did you kill?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Because you took Playa Grande, the village is now destroyed. Is that what you wanted for Nebaj?’

  ‘I needed Nebaj.’

  ‘Oh, “I ” . . .’ she mimicked him. ‘Yes, “I ” burned Nebaj, wonderful. “I ” killed the conscript soldiers. “I ” didn’t care what happened to those left behind when my precious back was turned . . .’

  Gord said softly, ‘What happened to you?’

  Her voice rose. ‘Is that important? Is it bloody important that we were hunted by that army? Roadblocks, you know about blocks? It is hardly important that we have run, hidden, been in terror, run again, eaten bloody roots, berries . . . We buried a child, the child died of bloody hypothermia. We dug a grave with our hands, with our fingers. I wouldn’t expect a bloody hero to find that important . . .’

  ‘You should join the march.’

  ‘Of course . . . Yes, sir. Right, bloody sir. Reporting for women’s work . . . Look after the casualties, no medicines. Patch up the wounded, no bandages. Minister to the bloody ego of the men. Why not, sir?’

  ‘You will please yourself.’

  ‘Don’t you understand, you bloody stupid pig-headed conceited man . . . Stop, before it is too late.’

  ‘It is too late.’

  He was moving forward, away from her, and the wheels clanked in their ritual behind him.

  She shouted, ‘Before you destroy everything.’

  He muttered into the wind, into the rain. ‘We have to go on.’

  The sentry at the gate saluted Colonel Arturo. His staff stood for him as he bustled into his office.

  The telephone was ringing on his desk before he had discarded his drenched coat. He listened to what he was told. He was told the place and the name and he was told of the fire.

  The cold shudder took him. He offered no explanation to the hovering staff. At the wall map he took a further plastic orange-headed pin and he placed the pin into the map. Easy for him to see the line that ran through the pins from the airstrip to the Sayaxché-Chinajá road to Playa Grande to Nebaj in the Ixil triangle. He dragged his coat back from the hook behind his door. He ran through the rain to his car. He drove fast towards his home. The place was Nebaj. The name was Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. The fire was a flame thrower.