The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  “Then let’s go,” said Chardy.

  45

  Dawn was coming.

  Trewitt forced his tongue across his dry lips, scanning the rocky slope before him. He could see nothing except scrawny grass, the spill of boulders, the crumbling mountainside itself.

  “Hey? You okay?” Ramirez called.

  “Okay, I guess,” Trewitt said.

  But he was not. The wound no longer hurt and the bunched shirt pressed hastily into it had at last stanched the bleeding. But he felt like he was going to fall out of his head. He’d vomited twice during the night too, whether before or after he was hit he was not sure. But at least with the sun would come some heat and perhaps he could stop shivering.

  “They coming pretty soon now, Jesus Mary. Hey, you got any bullets left?”

  Trewitt thought he did. Somewhere. In a pocket. He thought he’d look for them in a little while. What was the rush?

  “Kid, hey, kid. Kid! You all right?”

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “’Cause, goddamn, it look like I almost lose you there, and Ramirez don’t want to be on this mountaintop alone.” He laughed. He seemed to see something funny, insanely humorous, in all this.

  Trewitt tried to concentrate on what was swimming out of the night before him: the slope and, three hundred feet down, a line of crippled oaks and pines.

  And behind him? Nothing but blue space and miles of worthless beauty. They had run out of mountain. They were at its top, backed to the edge of a sheer drop-off. Hundreds of feet of raw space lay just beyond the crest.

  Trewitt became aware of a warm, wet sensation near his loins. He thought he was bleeding again. No, it was his bladder, emptying itself unaccountably. He was surprised he had anything left to piss and disgusted and ashamed for having lost control until he realized the bullet had probably wrecked the plumbing, the valves and tubes down there—it had hit him in the back, just above the waist, and not come out.

  “You gonna die, kid?”

  Trewitt thought, probably.

  He rubbed his hand across his face and felt his matted beard. He sure wished he had a drink of water. He could smell himself—and he’d always been so clean. He wished he could get warm. He wished he didn’t feel so doped up. He mourned the child. Why did they have to hurt the child? It was terrible about the child. Trewitt began to cry. A tear wobbled down his nose; it was so close to his eye it seemed huge and luminous, a great light-filled blur refracting the world into dazzle. But it fell off. The scrawny grass, the rocky slope, the dusty mountains all returned, lightening in the rising sun, under a mile of gray-going-silver sky. The sun rose like an abundant orange flare to the east.

  A shot rang out, kicking up a puff of dust nearby.

  “Wasn’t even close,” said Ramirez. “Come on, whores,” he screamed in his richest Spanish, “you can do better than that.”

  Through his cracked lips, Trewitt again offered his one question:

  “Who are they?”

  “Who cares?” Ramirez answered. “Evil men. Bandits. Gunmen, gangsters. Mother of Jesus, I’d like to kill me one. Mother of Jesus, send Reynoldo a present so that he will not die with a curse for you on his lips.” He threw the rifle suddenly to his shoulder, and fired.

  “Missed. Virgin, you disappoint me. He drew back. Son of a whore.” He recocked, the spent shell popping out and rolling down to Trewitt, who hid beneath him in a gathering of rocks.

  “I think maybe they’re going to rush us now. Why not? It’s light; they won’t shoot each other up. I’ll introduce you to them in a few seconds, Mr. Norteamericano. I’ll introduce you to Señor Machinegun and his friend Señor Other Machinegun, and his friend Señor Still Another Machinegun. And there’s Señor Telescope Rifle. I want them to meet my good friend over here, Señor Gringo Crazy Fool Who Wanted Adventures—Hey, what is your name? You must have a name?”

  “Trewitt. It’s Trewitt,” Trewitt said, anxious to get the information into Ramirez’s brain for some reason.

  “Mr. Crazy Gringo Trewitt Who Wants Adventures. Well, he sure got himself a hell of a one, didn’t he? In Old Mexico. Hey, Mr. Crazy Gringo Trewitt, I think they going to come any second now, oh, yes, any Mother-of-Jesus moment, and then we’ll see who the whores are, Hey you whores, come on, get it over with, whores, ha, they ain’t gonna stick their heads up, no sir.”

  He carried on like that crazily for a while, imploring them to come at him, begging them, blaspheming their mothers and their fathers and their children and their pets. He finally seemed to run out of energy.

  “Oh, Jesus,” moaned Trewitt.

  “He won’t help you now, Mr. Crazy Gringo, no He won’t I don’t see no Jesus around. I don’t see no Virgin, I don’t see no priests, no sister, no nothing. No church up here, no Holy Mother. I’d like to get me that black whore’s abortion with the telescope rifle. Oh, Holy Mother, give him to your sinning child, Reynoldo, just give him to me so I may shoot his balls off, please, I’ll go to mass every day for the rest of—Hey!”

  “Huh? Oh, I must have dozed off.”

  “A fine time for a nap, Chico. Hey, mister, I don’t think you gonna get off this mountain. I don’t think Reynoldo Ramirez gonna make it off either.”

  Another shot struck the ground.

  “Close, he sure was close on that. Jesus, I never thought I’d end up on a mountain with no place to go. I figured I’d get it from some crazy woman. Women, they’re all whores, crazy as monkeys. They cut your kidneys out to eat, you let ’em. I figured one’d get me good. Never figured on no mountain with no gringo, no sir. Madonna, Give me more time, damn you, She’s such a holy bitch, that woman, She wants you to light Her candles, but then when you need a miracle She ain’t around. GIVE ME MORE TIME, VIRGIN. Oh, yes, sí, here he comes, one of our friends, yes, I think I have him”—he lifted the rifle—“yes, yes, so nice”—and fired—“missed, you whore, you son of a black whore, he just ducked back. I just miss him by a hair—”

  “Oh, Jesus, I think I’m dying,” said Trewitt.

  “I think you are too. I think I am too.”

  Trewitt tried to bring himself to a sitting position. He was tired of lying down on the rough stones. But he couldn’t. His rifle skidded out of his grip. He coughed once and was amazed to notice a strand of pink saliva bridging the gap from his lips to the rifle, a scarlet gossamer, delicate and tense. Finally it snapped and disappeared.

  “Oh, Mother. Mother. Mom. Jesus, I’m so scared.”

  He tried to grab on to something.

  “Hold it down, okay? Your mama ain’t around,” said Ramirez.

  “Help me. Help me, please.”

  “Sorry, Chico. I got worries of my own.”

  Shock, golden and beautiful, spread through Trewitt’s body, calming him. It was a great smooth laziness flooding through him.

  From the side came a sudden burst of automatic fire. It chewed across the rocks in which they hid, and Trewitt felt the spray of fragments as the bullets exploded against the stones and knew enough to shrink back. He heard the Mexican scream. Then Ramirez fired his rifle, threw the bolt furiously, fired again, screaming, “Black dark whores, flower of pus, human filth.” He paused.

  “I think I got him.” He was breathing laboriously. “But he got me too. Oh, Virgin, forgive me. I want a priest. Virgin, forgive your sinning child.”

  Trewitt heard the rifle land on the ground and begin to slide down the rocks.

  The man with the automatic weapon sent another burst through the stones, kicking up dust and splinters. Trewitt shrank back.

  “Hey,” shouted Ramirez, “come and kill us, abortions.”

  “Mother. MOTHER!” shouted Trewitt, trying to jack-knife up.

  Another burst ripped across the crest.

  “I’m dying, oh fuck, I think I’m dying.”

  “Here they come,” said Ramirez. “Here come our wonderful friends.” He was holding one bleeding arm awkwardly. He bled also from the scalp. “Oh, look at the whores. Whores.
I spit on the whores. Soldiers. Look, Virgin, soldiers.”

  They were quite brazen by this time. Six, it turned out. Six men, most with AK-47s and one with a Soviet Dragunov sniper’s rifle, coming up the slope. They wore tiger suits, baggy camouflage denim, and red berets. Professionals. Real commandos. Trewitt lay and watched them come.

  “Hey, we fought them abortions pretty good, Mr. Crazy Gringo. Hey, I give you one hell of an adventure, one crazy hell of an adventure. We made ’em bleed some, we did. The whores. We took some whores with us. They had to bring in a fucking army to come take us away.”

  The men were half up the slope, their assault rifles at the high port. They were not merry with triumph at all, but moved with vivid economy of line and gesture, impassive and implacable, hard-core military, in a hurry to be done with it.

  “Whores,” Ramirez was saying. He was weeping too, and had fallen to his hands and knees but kept trying to stand. There was blood all over him. He kept trying to get a leg under himself but it would not work and he pitched forward. “They had to get an Army to get us. You whores! You bags of pus and shit. Virgin, I ask your forgiveness, for I have sinned. I seek to make a contrition. Accept your child Ramirez. You whores! Come ahead, whores, and be done. Ramirez is not frightned. I am so frightened. Lord Jesus, I am frightened. You BAGS OF SHIT!”

  But his imprecations could not speed them—they came at the same grim pace, picking their way through the rocks.

  Trewitt sat upright in a sudden spasm. He had the feeling of being in several worlds at once. His wound had opened and he bled profusely. He sat in a puddle and felt dirty. He wanted his mother. He mourned Miguel. A big bird flew overhead, its dark shadow skipping across him. It roared, a big flapping bird, huge as anything he’d ever seen in his life.

  “Mother, OH, MOTHER, PLEASE!” he shouted.

  The black bird hovered above him; it was a helicopter and it caught the assault team in the open. It had come from nowhere—from below the peak, hurtling up the sheer wall behind Trewitt and Ramirez. A Huey, painted black, no insignia, its roar like a bottle fly’s, slow-moving, insistent. Trewitt’s vision blurred and he could not track the details in the sudden commotion of dust and gunfire, but he saw a long burst cutting across the slope after the scattering commandos. Tracer bullets pursued the running men and took them down. The chopper swung after two who escaped the kill zone, pausing atop each to blow him away. The last man—he had the Dragunov—threw his weapon far and raised his hands. Above him the bird circled, then hung. The commando stood in an oval of whirring dust thirty feet beneath the stationary machine. Suddenly the helicopter shot skyward. It rose free of gravity, as though escaping the soldier beneath. The man detonated in a startling clap and flash.

  “Jesus, Mary, he had a bomb,” Ramirez said.

  The helicopter was above them now and then had settled a hundred feet away. Trewitt could not hear a thing but he twisted to watch as, out of it, sprang three men in blue uniforms and baseball caps with M-16s.

  Trewitt raised his hand to greet his rescuers and recognized the first of them as Paul Chardy, who was pausing only to jam another banana clip into his weapon before racing to him.

  Trewitt died somewhere in the air during the hop to the other side of the border. Chardy did not see the exact moment; perhaps there was no exact moment. Trewitt had never been fully conscious after the rescue. He lay blood-spattered and filthy on the floor—deck, in the patois—of the Huey. Chardy had been here before, a thousand times; in Vietnam in the ’60s, in Peru, and always it was the same: the huge roar, the wash of bright light and turbulent air from the open port, the vibrations, the stench of fuel, the stink of powder from recently fired weapons—and the dead man on the deck.

  They’d thrown a sheet across his face and tried to tuck his limbs neatly, but an arm fell free in the airborne pounding and twisted the hand into delicate frieze. Trewitt: he sure didn’t look like the dreamy young man Chardy had seen in Rosslyn, in a suit, in an office, in the middle of a civilized afternoon. He looked like any grunt, a soldier, dirty and tired and dead. It occurred to Chardy that he knew so little about him.

  And there was nobody to ask, for Trewitt had no friends among them—besides Chardy the two FBI special agents sitting across from him in the gloomy space, with impassive faces, really just police beef. And then that other curious treasure, a Mexican, huge and wounded and sullen, eyes insane, who said Jesus Mary, Jesus Mary over and over. Who could he be?

  Chardy looked at him. The man’s arm was stiff in a U.S. government-issue gauze bandage and he leaned groggily against the quilting of the forward bulkhead.

  Who are you? What’s in that stupid head of yours? What secrets, you pig?

  With a suddenness the pitch of the engine dropped and Chardy felt the craft descending. A cascade of white light rushed in upon them as the bird finally settled dustily into the reflection of the sun off the desert floor, and seconds later, with a jolt, they had landed and the engine died.

  Blearily, they got out. Men rushed over, numerous FBI special agents and Border Patrol officers. Chardy stood alone in the great heat as the activity swirled around him, men who knew what to do. He fished about in his pockets, came up with his sunglasses, and hooked them on to drive off the glare of the penetrating radiance of this latitude. They were at a Border Patrol installation astride the Camino del Diablo, the devil’s road, in southeastern Arizona, a freeway for illegal immigrants and dope traffickers, whose ease of transit this new installation had been built to impede. An American flag hung limp against a bright blue sky. Away from the Quonsets and cinderblock sprang brown sandy hills, a little spiny greenery, and rocks. Chardy had been here before too, a thousand times: a little jerry-built outpost where men occasionally died.

  He looked back to Trewitt, now a form under a blanket on a stretcher beside the quiet helicopter.

  “Coffee, Paul?” asked Leo Bennis. “Or iced tea? We’ve got some iced tea.”

  “No.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know how he lasted so long with a bullet through him there.”

  “I guess he was a tough kid,” Chardy said.

  “He did okay. He did fine.”

  “Hey, mister?”

  It was the Mexican.

  “Hey, you cannot do this. Take me from my country. You must take me back.”

  Chardy didn’t say anything to the man. Shouldn’t somebody be looking after him?

  “You’ll be taken care of,” said Leo. “Don’t worry.”

  “It’s going to cost plenty, I tell you that now. Plenty, huh?” He smiled. Then he said, “Hey, that boy, crazy boy, he don’t know nothing. You got to wipe his nose for him. I thought all gringos was big men. Ain’t you got no better guy than this?”

  He smiled, showing his bright teeth.

  Chardy smiled back, then hit him in the nose, feeling it smash as the man went heavily down into the dust. He would have killed him too, except that Bennis and ultimately several others held him back.

  46

  Lanahan’s moment of terror was approaching fast now. He ran a raspy tongue across leather lips; he looked at his watch, the water glass before him, then at Sam Melman’s water glass across the table. His mouth and throat begged his brain for water, but he had sworn to himself to yield nothing to the men in this room—all of them older by at least ten and more likely fifteen years, none particularly friendly, the Operations Directorate elect at the weekly division-head meeting at Langley—and so he would not take any more water than his mentor over there. But Melman had a notoriously high discomfort threshold and could do without water for hours. He had not touched his, not at all. The guy next to him must have blown a couple of networks to the Russians that very morning, because he’d already tossed away a glass and a half. And there had to be bad news due from Soviet Bloc too, because that man was really sucking the fluid down while looking about with a kind of abstracted horror seen only in meetings—a wash of pallor and a mad flittiness of the eyes, a radiant and all-encompass
ing fear.

  But Sam, across the table, sat in calm splendor. He reached across the polished wood, showing a quarter-inch of cream-colored French cuff, and idly caressed the glass. Lanahan watched his fine fingers on the cool vessel, then diverted his gaze to his own glass, just a few inches from his fingers. It stood under a rectangular fluorescent light whose glow made the glass seem impossibly vivid.

  Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink. The line rattled around in his skull idiotically, something remembered from parochial school; it would not go away. He concentrated to drive it out.

  At the other end of the table a studious fellow off the European desk was detailing at tedious length a recently completed transaction with a Soviet naval attaché in Nice. It was a pointless and self-serving narrative, full of allusions to people and events Lanahan had no knowledge of. Hearing classified stuff like this had long ago lost its titillating charm and the speaker’s loquacity was agonizing; for Lanahan knew that after Europe stood down, it was Far East’s turn; and then came Special Projects. And Melman, among so many other things, was Special Projects. He looked again at the agenda in pale, blurred mimeograph before him as if to make certain and saw, yes, yes, under the Special Projects rubric, it was still there:

  Danzig Update (Lanahan sup’v.)

  He reached and touched the glass. He touched it with one stumpy finger, felt its smoothness. He knew mystically, out of a private bargain with himself, that if he gave in to the temptation and drank the water, catastrophe would follow inevitably. It was foreordained; ii was certain. Yet, suicidally, that only made the water more attractive. His throat ached for it. He looked at his watch. Thirty seconds had passed.

  Lanahan was in a real jam. He could not find Chardy. Chardy had disappeared on him. He’d shaken his two babysitters and not been seen since early the previous afternoon. He had not been at his apartment. And Miles had been under special instructions to keep watch on Chardy. And he knew Melman would ask about Chardy. And that if he tried to lie, he’d blow it. And that if he told Melman that Chardy had something going with Trewitt in Mexico, he was in deep trouble. And he knew that if Chardy had gone to the Russians, he was in desperate trouble.