The Black Death

by Nick Carter

  I lit a cigarette. “Valdez goes to the Citadel every morning, comes back here every night. Under heavy guard. That right, Duppy?”

  He rubbed his piece down with an oily rag, not looking at me. “That right, blanc. Heavy guard. One jeep in front, one jeep behind, and Dr. Valdez in middle. Guards is Tonton Macoute. Bogymen. Mean bastards. When they gets here to gate they turns him over to P.P.’s men.”

  I smoked in silence for a moment.

  Duppy said: “I know what you think, blanc, and it don’t work. Not try it No chance. We just get our tails shot off and let the whole world know we here.” His laugh was cynical. “Not that make much difference to us then. We dead mens.”

  He had been reading me correctly. Or very nearly. I wasn’t about to let Duppy know what I was really thinking.

  I watched the ebony matte features closely and said, “You don’t think we could do it? Snatch Valdez somewhere on the road between the gate and the Citadel?”

  Duppy hawked, spat, and glowered at me from his red-yellow eyes. “No, blanc. I told you! Can’t be done that way.”

  “We’ve got grenades. I’ve got some plastique. All four of us have automatic weapons.” I was baiting him a little, and enjoying it, and I made myself sound a little superior and pompous.

  “I think that it would be perfectly feasible to set up an ambush on that road. We would have the advantage of surprise. There are only four of us, I know, but if we plan it carefully we could—”

  Without haste he turned the Thompson gun so it covered me. One hand, like a bunch of black bananas, curled near the trigger assembly. He made no effort to conceal this, but his gap-toothed smile was white and amiable for a change and it put ice down my spine. I had a hunch that when Duppy smiled and looked friendly he was prepared to kill you.

  He wasn’t, quite yet, ready for that. You can’t silence a Tommy gun.

  Duppy, still smiling, narrowed his eyes at me and said: “You got a lot to learn, blanc. One thing is that you isn’t boss here. Swan boss. If Swan say make the ambush I do it—but Swan ain’t gonna say that. She not so dumb like you.”

  I nodded and matched his smile and his amiability. “All right. I’m a man who will listen. What’s wrong with my plan?”

  He sighed and shook his massive black head. “Noise! That the worse thing wrong with it. Even we pet Valdez we still got to make it to the coast and you boat. Never do it, blanc. Papa Doc have his air force out, his coast patrol looking, his army combing the jungle. Be Tonton Macoute ever where. P.P. have his black uniforms after us. No chance, blanc, no chance at all.”

  I pretended to study his words. He was right, of course. It was a lousy scheme and I had just been trying it on for size.

  “ ‘Nother thing, blanc. There ain’t four of us. Swan stay out of all gun fighting. We need Swan for uprising, for invasion.

  Swan dead, everything dead. No. We don’t put Swan in no danger.”

  “There is still Hank Willard.” I wanted to keep Duppy talking.

  He spat and laughed, a genuine and full-throated laugh of contempt. “That skinny ant! What good he? Anyway he crippled. He also scared and just want out of Haiti and this ain’t his fight no how. Hank be no good at all, blanc.”

  I didn’t agree with him, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Duppy held up his hand and began counting on those black banana fingers. “So that really only make two of us. Me and you. Now in front jeep is five Macoute, in back jeep is five Macoute, in middle jeep wid the Doctor is four Macoute. All jeeps got 50s on them. Macoute got submachine guns same as we. P.P. got tracking dogs. You still want try it that way, blanc?”

  He was one hell of an actor. So am I when I have to be. I fidgeted and hemmed and hawed a bit and allowed that maybe I was wrong. My idea stank.

  There was a long silence. He lit one of his Splendids and stared at the sky. Then, as if it were an after thought, he said: “Anyway you forgetting, blanc. You the stud! We decided that, I recollect. You getting paid all money. You the one got to go over that fence and into P.P.’s compound and bring Dr. Valdez out. We help you plan it, and we cover you, but you the one do it.”

  He was so right. I had known that from the beginning. I was the one who had to go in and get killed. Because Duppy wanted it that way. Duppy was going to plan and arrange it that way when the time came. For reasons of his own. Reasons that stemmed from KGB orders. Straight from the Kremlin.

  The sun was warm melted butter on my face. I closed my eyes and let myself hover on the edge of sleep. I was not too discontented. I had part of the puzzle worked—but there were gaps, big gaps, and only time and events would fill them. The time was very near.

  Lyda came up to the platform with lunch. Crations and instant chocolate in cold water. She had found a spring-fed pool and taken a bath and her hair was still damp. She nestled down between the two of us and took the binoculars and studied the valley for a long time. We talked and made tentative plans. I went along with them on everything, only demurring now and then to make it look better and avoid Duppy’s suspicion. I had my own plan. All I had to do was wait until precisely the right moment to put it into effect.

  It came before I was quite ready for it. The sun was still an hour high when there was a bustle around the gate and we saw them gathering the “zombies” and marching them in and counting them. Lyda pointed to a dust cloud that was drifting down the road from the Citadel. Three jeeps.

  She grabbed the binoculars from me. “They’re bringing Valdez back now. I want another good look at him. Maybe I was wrong this morning.”

  “You wrong,” Duppy growled. “That Valdez all right. Certain. You just don’t know what five years being prisoner do to a man, Swan.”

  I thought he was lying, and I wondered why he bothered. I was sure that the man Lyda had seen was a decoy, a fake Valdez. The real Valdez was too precious to risk on a long open drive twice a day. That was an open temptation, an invitation to—

  The hidden gunner accepted the invitation. The crack of a high-powered rifle drifted to us across the valley.

  Lyda, with the glasses trained on the middle jeep, flinched as though the bullet had struck her. She gasped, “Oh Christ! Oh, MY GOD! He’s been shot. They’ve shot Valdez!”

  Duppy cursed and grabbed for the glasses. I moved softly toward the back of the platform and then stood up. My eyes are a little better than perfect and I could see well enough.

  All three jeeps had jammed to a halt. Tonton Macoute were running all over the place, angry and confused and staring and pointing up at the mountain side. That gunner had better be well on his way.

  A little knot of Tonton Macoute gathered around the middle jeep. They were looking at something on the ground. A couple of them were kneeling and working on the man. I saw a white Panama hat lying in the dirt off to one side. My guess was a telescopic sight and a head shot. An expert marksman. I moved a little closer to the wooden stairs leading down the palm tree.

  I had to crane to see now. One of the Tonton Macoute, obviously an officer, straightened up and made a gesture of disgust. Shook his head and flung his arms wide and I could almost hear the word: “Mort!”

  Duppy said, “They kill him, Swan. Some dirty bastard kill your Dr. Valdez.”

  Lyda was in shock. She had forgotten me. She clung to Duppy’s massive bicep and stared and said over and over again, “Why? But why? Why would they want to kill him?”

  Time to go. I started down the tree, making no sound. As I went I heard Duppy saying: “Depend who they is, Swan. Not P.P. or Papa Doc—they never kill valuable man like Valdez. But I know who do want him dead, Swan. CIA want him dead. Them miserable American bastards want Valdez good and dead, you bet. They do it, Swan. CIA do it!”

  I smiled as I reached the ground. Another piece of the puzzle in place.

  I heard Lyda give a muted little scream of rage and anguish. I picked up my musette bag, already packed, and kicked the dozing Hank Willard in the ribs. He came up swearing, and I clamped a hand over his
mouth and whispered for thirty seconds.

  Willard’s eyes widened and his mouth opened, and he began to spit out protests.

  “What the screwing hell, Sam? You’re looking to get me killed. I’m an airplane driver, not a screwing—”

  Time was precious. Every second was uranium. I put my hand in his ginger beard and twisted. “You do it,” I hissed. “You do it right. You ever expect to see the States again, or your girl in Hong Kong, you do it! Fail me and I’ll kill you.”

  He gasped and nodded and clawed at my hand. “Okay— okay. But Jesus—I—”

  I shoved him away. “Do it! Right! I’ll see you. Whether you get dead or rewarded is up to you.”

  Time to go. I dove into the thick brush and started working my way down the slope. It would be dark soon, and I didn’t think Duppy would come after me. He would have his hands full with Lyda for a time.

  Duppy’s dream world was beginning to come apart, and I was the demolition expert.

  Chapter 11

  Time, like the man said, was of the essence. And silence was golden. I thought of a few more cliches as I crawled down the 45-degree slant of the spur to the talus slope that footed it. The brush was thick and made the going hard; on the other hand it covered me from above and below and kept me from sliding and making noise. When the time came for noise I would make plenty of it. But not yet.

  Where the brush faded away and the talus started I stopped and blended myself into a last thick growth of bush Below me the terrain began to flatten out, about two hundred yards of loose rock and pebbles and sandy clay. No cover. I wondered briefly if the area was mined, then forgot it. Mined or not I had to cross it.

  In ten minutes it would be dark enough to try it. 1 spent the time in making the grenades ready. I had twine and tape and all the makings and it took me five minutes I didn’t have any H.E. grenades, only fragmentation, and I had to trust them to do the job. I checked the Tommy gun and the .45 and the Luger and the stiletto in the chamois spring sheath Then it was dark and I had not an excuse left for lingering. 1 started worming my way down the talus slope to the fence beyond. I was halfway over when the lights went on I had been afraid of that. There was already a blaze of light at the gate, but now powerful searchlights—hidden in trees where 1 hadn’t spotted them—began to play up and down the fence. 1 froze and cursed and made like an ostrich. Duppy must have known about the hidden lights. Duppy hadn’t mentioned them. It figured.

  They were just horsing around with the lights, feeling secure and not expecting any trouble, and they missed me and after a couple of minutes the lights flicked off. I crawled to the fence, alert now for walking guards and dogs, and started planting my grenades.

  I had pulled the pins and taped the spring levers down, with an end of twine knotted under and around each strip of tape. I taped a grenade to a fence post, near the base, then a grenade in the middle of the wire between two posts, then another grenade at the base of the second post. The three twine leads came back to tie into a single line of heavy cord that I payed out cautiously as I crawled backward from the fence.

  A guard passed, walking the inside of the fence. He had a dog on a leash and he was using a flashlight now and then, throwing the beam around carelessly. I shoved my face into rock shards and waited. If he spotted the grenades, I would have to go off half-cocked and risk killing myself as well as him.

  He didn’t spot the grenades. I waited until his steps faded away, then I back-tracked some more. When I had seventy-five yards of margin I stopped and got my head behind a foot-high boulder and got ready to go for broke.

  I took a minute to wonder what was happening back up on the spur, between Duppy and Lyda and Hank Willard. It was chancy and anybody’s guess. I had given Hank instructions to be passed to the girl and Duppy. Duppy was bound to be in a rage because I had tricked him and jumped the gun and might even have loused up his plans for my death. It was bound to worry him. So was the fact that I was forcing his hand—he had to march to my tune now, instead of his—and that I had tossed the crap into the fan before he was ready for it.

  I yanked hard on the cord. The idea was that the cord jerked the three twine leads, and the twine ripped off the tape binding the spring levers on the grenades.

  The cord went limp in my hand, all tension gone. I waited, counting, trying to squeeze myself into the good earth of Haiti. Five . . . six . . . seven . . . e—

  They were all short fused. The grenades slammed the night open with a great dull roar and a spreading blossom of red and yellow and shivering concussion. Shrapnel hissed off the talus near me. I was up and running.

  Both fence posts were bent and sagging like over-cooked spaghetti. The segment of wire between them drooped. The middle grenade had opened a six-foot rent in the steel mesh. I wormed through it, got caught in a porcupine of barbed wire, kicked and ripped my way out of that and took off like a big-assed bird for tree cover. That was fifty yards away and I knew I was running through mines and I was cold and sweating at the same time. I tried to run without touching the ground, knowing it couldn’t be done.

  The Carter luck held and I was still O.K. when I broke into the trees and flopped down just in time for the first searchlight to miss me. I lay and panted and checked rapidly to see if I still had all my gear. I did. I waited ten seconds, all I could afford, to see if the three back on the spur were going to come through. That depended on Duppy, who by this time would be gnashing his big white teeth in rage.

  They began firing down at the gate and I let out a deep sigh of relief. Lyda must have talked him around. I listened to” the light stutter of the Sten gun and the deeper roar of the .45 Tommy guns as they cut in and out in nasty spastic bursts. It sounded like an army on that ridge, and that was the way I wanted it, just as I wanted a diversion, wanted the black uniforms and the Tonton Macoute to think it was all coming from outside. While I was inside.

  There was confusion at the gate house and the lights went out. Someone screamed in pain. The concealed searchlights kept swiveling around, and kept missing me and the hole in the wire. I prayed that this state of affairs would continue and began making my way up the hill toward P.P. Trevelyn’s modern palace. A prong of yellow moon lifted over the Citadel to the east. Two men were working down the hill toward me.

  I crouched at the base of an ancient mahogany and snicked the haft of the stiletto down into my right hand. The threesome on the ridge were keeping up a steady fire. By the red flashes and the sounds I knew they had separated and were triangulating the gate.

  Slowly, without sound, I put the Tommy gun and the musette bag on the ground beside me. The two men were close now, talking in hoarse whispers. I moved a little way around the thick tree bole, so it was between me and the approaching guards. Sounds fool you at night, but I thought they were about ten feet apart. They should pass on either side of the tree. I was counting on that. I made myself small. Not an easy thing, because I am not small. I wasn’t looking for trouble at the moment. I just wanted them to pass me by.

  It was not to be. His luck was bad and he chose that particular moment in space and time to answer nature. By now the moon was bright enough for him to see the big mahogany tree and he just had to come to it. A real son of a bitch.

  I was in a fold of shadow cast by enormous roots that broke ground. I gave him a chance but he didn’t want it. He was within six inches of me and then he looked down and saw the musette bag and the Tommy gun. He caught his breath, his last one, because I had an arm around his neck and the stiletto in his heart from the rear. I squeezed back all sound and let him down gently and dived back into the shadow of the tree. Fifteen seconds at most.

  I waited. The other man stopped moving and called softly: “Carlos? Where are you, man? What the hell you doing?” Soft, slurring Creole.

  I waited.

  He began to move slowly toward the tree. When he spoke again he sounded nervous. “Carlos? You big fool, man. You play games with me? Carlos—you cut it out and answer me, man.”
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br />   He stepped into a shaft of moonlight and I raised the stiletto to ear level and a little back of my shoulder. When I saw what it was I hesitated for a split instant and in that time he sensed my presence and tried to bring up his rifle. He wore a denim uniform and his eyes, in the pale wash of moonlight, were a blank staring white. A zombie.

  There was nothing zombie-like in the way he moved. My stiletto was just a whisper faster. It took him in the throat below his Adam’s apple. I leaped at him and slammed a fist at the rifle. It spun away. I clobbered him on the temple with my right fist and reached for the stiletto haft with my left hand. He made agony sounds, trying to scream and couldn’t, and I ripped the stiletto around and his throat opened and the hot blood gushed over my hand. He went to his knees. I snapped out the stiletto and stepped back and kicked him the rest of the way down.

  I faded back into shadow and listened for a moment. They were firing back from the gate now. Soon they would get organized, and then Duppy and Lyda and Hank Willard would have to cut out and run for it. I hoped they ran fast and far and long enough, but I didn’t count on it. Duppy would have his wits about him by this time, and I didn’t know what he would do. Only God and Duppy knew that, and I didn’t have time to worry about it now.

  It had been, like all good executions, silent. I went to the zombie and turned him over with my foot. I knelt and took a good look. Those eyes?

  Contact lens. Milky white contact lens. That was the trick that made instant zombies to scare away timid natives. I had an idea then and I thumbed the staring bits of glass out of his eyes. I held one up to the moon. From the user’s side it was transparent enough. Some bit of scientific flummery gave a clear view. I wiped the stiletto on his denim jacket and dragged him back into the shadows.

  I worked fast. The gunfire on the ledge was thinning now, and growing in volume near the gate. Moving away from the gate. P.P.’s men had been reinforced and had guessed at the paucity of the attackers and were starting to move out. Later, when they fitted all the bits and pieces together and made sense out of the hole in the fence, they would come looking for me. But that was later.