by Dick Stivers
“It’s what you see,” he had told her. “After that, dying, thinking about dying isn’t the same. You recognize the advantages of being dead. No memories. No thinking…”
He’d said it only hours before she’d died — died because of his bravado and macho stupidity…
“Lyons!”
Blancanales gripped his shoulder. Shaking him, Blancanales whispered through the noise of the wind and beating rain, “You hurt? What happened?”
“What?”
“You made a noise, you groaned. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m great. I’m a killing machine. Lead the way. Dead meat is my business.”
In the faint light, Blancanales studied Lyons’s face for a moment. Then he turned and continued uphill, a shadow moving through the shadows of the trees.
Lyons followed. He concentrated on the warm rain washing over his face and body. He touched the rough bark of the trees. He felt the ooze in his boots. He thought of the mission, only the mission.
Quesada.
11
As he stepped from his apartment, Colonel Robert Quesada turned back and promised the two French whores, “Je reviens tout de suite.”
“Ah, oui, mon general,” begged the women. “Vite. Vite. II est isole ici.”
Quesada followed the veranda around the building. Rain poured from the roof in a curtain of water He stayed close to the building to prevent the splattering streams from spotting his slacks and polo shirt.
In the garden, water covered the cobblestones of the walkway. Wind tore the silk trees and bougainvillea. The gusts created shifting patterns of color and shadow as the birds of paradise and orchids and copas de oroswayed in the decorative floodlights.
His Cuban heels clicking across Spanish-patterned tiles, Quesada followed the shelter of the verandas to the wrought-iron gate. Leaning into the storm, he washed his face with rain. He gulped a mouthful. He sloshed the water around in his mouth to wash away the brandy and the taste of the whores’ perfumes.
The call from his militia commander had interrupted an afternoon and evening of pleasure. With Senora Quesada and the children remaining in the Colonia San Benito mansion, the colonel had allowed himself the luxury of the young Frenchwomen during his stay at his family’s estate. Soon, he would continue on to La Escuela.
At “The School,” military discipline ruled. Regulations denied diversions for the soldiers until they completed their course of instruction. The officers and staff enjoyed the pleasures and entertainment of Miami, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. Sometimes Quesada arranged for his South American friends to enjoy a night of comforts at his finca, only minutes from the installation by plane or helicopter. Though he reserved the two Frenchwomen for himself, Miami and Cancun furnished pale-skinned blondes and redheads — with their soft, pouting lips and creme-smooth yet disco-muscled thighs — for the Argentines and Chileans and exiled Bolivians in the guest rooms and beds of the Quesada finca.
If the storm had not swept in from the Pacific this afternoon, his superiors in the International Alliance would have expected him to continue on to La Escuela. Though his pilots had assured him the helicopter could make the thirty-minute flight to Reitoca in safety, he enjoyed the excuse of the weather delay. Meetings and planning sessions did not thrill him like the two young blondes. He would fulfill his duty to the International Alliance when the weather cleared.
This detail tonight would deny him the pleasures of the two Paris girls for only a few minutes.
Turning his back on the garden, he stepped to the security entry. His magnetically encoded identity card opened the steel gate.
As the electric motor whirred to roll the gate across, a hard-eyed young soldier glanced through the bulletproof glass of the guard post. He gave his colonel a sharp salute. Returning the salute, Quesada followed the walkway to the family offices.
Mendez waited with a report. A militia lieutenant feared for his pitiless violence, Mendez stood five foot six and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. The man’s fat hid iron muscles. His smiling moon face hid the sadism of an inquisitor. Quesada had seen Mendez thumb out the eyes of a boy who would not betray his father.
Rainwater drained from the gray Finca de Quesada uniform that Mendez wore. Mud stained the man’s pants up to and above the knee. In the hours since Quesada received the report of the foreigners in the Cadillac attacking the Popular Front Forces, Mendez had visited the roadside villages and isolated farmers in the area. If a shopkeeper or campesino or shepherd had seen the foreigners, they would tell Mendez.
“This is information on the foreigners?” Quesada asked.
“Yes, padron. I went to many places, questioned many people. They spoke only of a plane.”
“When?”
“Today, early in the afternoon.” replied Mendez. “Down and then gone. But the colonel of Las Boinas Verdes radioed with much more. The foreigners talked with the soldiers. They said they were North American mercenaries traveling to Honduras to fight.”
“To Honduras?”
“Yes. They told the soldiers Honduras.”
“You have descriptions?”
“One, blond, blue eyes, tall. Another, darker, but also Anglo. The third, a North American who spoke Spanish. Graying hair, perhaps a Puerto Rican. There was a fourth. The soldiers think he is Indian. He did not speak to the soldiers. They all covered their faces.”
Quesada considered the information. Four foreign soldiers en route to Honduras. But if they went to fight the Sandinistas, why did they travel through Morazan? Contrascoming from Texas, Miami and New York flew to Tegucigulpa by jet, then took small planes to El Paraiso. From there, trucks took them to the war.
Could the foreign mercenaries be traveling to La Escuela? Quesada would radio the comandantewith the descriptions. Perhaps, through some incredible error or breach of security, they had intended to come to the finca.
Impossible. No officer at the school would give a recruit or hired instructor the location of the fincalanding strip. That would risk betrayal of Quesada and risk the secrecy of La Escuela.
No, that could not be the answer. The question of the foreigners’ identities and purpose might never be answered. But if they remained in the area, or traveled on through Morazan, Mendez or one of the other men Quesada employed would receive the information. Then Mendez would question the foreigners.
“Colonel!” The radio operator called out from the other office. “A message on the Yankee radio.”
Quesada went to the communications room. The radio operator left the colonel alone to review the transmission.
Friends in Washington had supplied Quesada with several radios. Circuitry designed by the electronic engineers of the United States National Security Agency assured secret and secure communications between the fincaand San Salvador and between Quesada and his fighting units in the mountains.
Now a light glowed on one of the sophisticated consoles, indicating that the radio had received and automatically recorded a coded “burst” transmission. Quesada slipped on the headphones and listened. An electronically detoned voice droned the message.
“Sources in the capital report dispatch of three American paramilitary operatives to Salvador. Salvadoran national will assist operatives in mission to kidnap you with intent to return you to United States.”
Quesada went cold. Despite the warmth of the humid, stormy night, he shivered as fear and rage seized him.
His friends in Washington had saved him again. The first time, they had ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to delay an arrest warrant. The delay allowed him to escape Miami for Salvador.
But now the North American death squad that had annihilated his soldiers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, who had driven him from the sanctuary of his Miami mansion, now that death squad pursued him to Morazan.
Three American operatives. And a Salvadoran national.
Quesada laughed. Before, he fought in their country. Now they came to him.
T
hey had stepped into the mouth of the devil.
Here, they would die hideously.
12
“What?”
“What did he say?” the newsmen asked one another.
The van driver slammed his door shut. Water streamed from his yellow plastic hat. In the minute that he had stood outside with the Salvadoran army officer, the rain had soaked his clothing. Rain hammered on the sheet metal of the passenger van in an unrelenting, overwhelming noise.
Outside, through the sheets of water pouring over the windows, they saw only darkness and smears of light. The headlights of a truck illuminated a blur of rain, thousands of tiny points scratching against the darkness. Where a searchlight shone on the road and the hillsides, they saw smears of mud brown and gray green. At the end of the two-hour drive over washboard roads, they had expected to photograph burned trucks and bodies. But they saw only rain and mud.
The driver shouted over the rain noise. “He say we go back.”
“I’m with the New York Times!Who does that beaner think he is?”
“Did you tell him the international correspondent of Peoplemagazine wanted to interview him?”
“How much money does he want?” another reporter shouted out.
“What’s he trying to hide?”
“Misters!” The middle-aged, graying driver shouted them down. “He says we go, we go.”
“We don’t pay you to drive us around in the rain! We want copy and we want photos.”
Starting the van’s engine, the driver ended the argument. “Mister, I want to live. El capitansays go, I go.”
A very overweight young reporter with United Press International slammed his fist into the seat. The reporter’s jowls went red with anger and frustration. He slammed his fist into the seat again and again. “Another wasted day!”
“We should have gone with Jose,” an older journalist said.
“To visit his girlfriend and her family?” A reporter in the next seat asked with a sneer. “You want to spend a week in some godforsaken village with mud up to your ass?”
A kilometer past the village of Lolotiquillo, the young Puerto Rican they knew as Jose Lopez had taken his backpack and stepped out. “See you next week. My amiga lives here.” Then he had shouldered his pack and followed a narrow trail toward a cluster of plank and sheet-tin shacks.
“Maybe you could get exclusive interviews,” the fat UPI reporter suggested, “with the pigs and flies.”
Light flashed in the back window as the second van followed them down the road. Ahead, their headlights shone into a tunnel of rain and mud. Despite the rain, the air inside the van remained sultry. The reporters and photographers sweated in their seats.
They had left Gotera an hour before dark. Because the vans lacked the heavy-duty suspension and powerful engines of the army troop trucks, the road had forced the hired drivers to slow to only a few kilometers per hour to bump over the rocks and ruts. But knowing a scene of terror and murder awaited their cameras and notebooks made the ride worthwhile. Now the frustrated newsmen knew they faced another hour or two in the storm, then an uncomfortable night on the floors of an abandoned hotel. All for nothing.
Lurching and rocking, the van followed the muddy track across the hill. A lightning flash startled the group.
“This is too much rain,” the driver shouted back to them. “Too late in year. Very bad for roads.”
“What about the international flights?” one journalist shouted out. “Think there’ll be flights out tomorrow?”
“If the rain stops,” the driver answered.
“Flying out?” a photographer asked the journalist.
“Damn right. I don’t get paid unless I file. I’ll bounce over to Lebanon and get a story. I’m tight with the Christian militia…”
“The Druze too?”
“All of them. Depends on who I’m talking to. I’ll file a story on anyone who’s killing people. Maybe I’ll go to Libya and see what’s doing. There’s got to be a war somewhere.”
“There’s one here. Somewhere.”
Guiding the van slowly around a curve, the driver suddenly stomped on the brake.
“What’s the problem?”
“What’s happening?”
Flicking on the interior light, the driver raised his hands and put his palms against the windshield.
A black form stepped through the headlights.
The journalists saw a rain-soaked black-uniformed man with a rifle. The man wore a black bandana over his face to cover his features. Only his eyes showed.
In the van’s second seat, an American journalist who had covered NATO maneuvers recognized the black-clad soldier’s rifle as a U.S. Army weapon: an M-16 automatic rifle fitted with an M-203 grenade launcher.
And in a custom plastic and spring-steel shoulder holster, the man wore a NATO prototype weapon distinguished from all other autopistols by the extended magazine and fold-down off-hand grip-lever: a Beretta 93-R with a sound suppressor.
The journalist knew he now witnessed an international headline. This black-uniformed soldier did not represent any of the Salvadoran guerrilla factions. But the American journalist did not speak to the others. He had his own career to advance. This might get him a Pulitzer Prize. Maybe a few appearances on morning talk shows.
Slipping the lens cap off his motorized Nikon, he set the focus ring at three feet and the f-stop at 1.8. He flicked the camera’s exposure-mode to automatic. He braced the camera on the seat in front of him and waited to photograph the man he knew to be an American commando illegally operating in the mountains of Morazan.
The black-clad American went to the driver’s door and motioned for the driver to roll down the glass. While the rain poured through the open window, the American and the driver whispered together.
The journalist touched the camera’s button. He heard the shutter click open. He held the camera absolutely still as it took an electronically metered exposure of the soldier’s face in the window.
“Gracias a Dios!” the driver exclaimed. “Gracias por su ayuda! Mi esposa y mis ninos…”
“De nada,” they all heard the commando say. “No es necesita a morirse ustedes en esta guerra.”
Then the commando left. As he passed through the headlights, the journalist adjusted the focus and snapped two more photos.
“We stop here,” the driver announced. He motioned downhill. “If we go, we die. Terroristaswait…”
The driver saw the journalist snapping photos of the departing commando.
Rounding the curve, the second van’s headlights revealed another black-clad commando with an autoweapon. Both men returned to the night and rain, suddenly gone.
Before the journalist could protect the camera, the driver got up, went to him and snatched the Nikon from his hands. The driver then turned and slammed the camera against the dash, again and again. He tore open the film door. A coil of film came out. The driver tossed the smashed camera out the window.
For a second, the journalist only stared at the driver. Then the American newsman screamed, “You know what you’ve done? That was a United States Army Special Forces commando! Operating in a war zone! In violation of congressional prohibitions! Those photos would have been on the front page of every newspaper in the world! You are fired! You have just lost your job. You will never work again for the news services. You are out of work!”
The driver smiled. The smile became a chuckle, then a laugh.” Si, senor. Perhaps now I have no job. But except for that Yankee soldier…” the driver looked to the darkness where Rosario Blancanales and Carl Lyons had disappeared “…I would have no life.”
13
From the tree line behind the abandoned cornfields, Lyons and Blancanales observed the squad of assassins. The steep rise of the forested hillside allowed the Stony men to look down on the fields and farmhouse and road.
Lightning flashes illuminated the scene in stark moments of black and arc-light white. A hundred meters of rotting cornstalks and fur
rows gone to weeds separated Lyons and Blancanales from the flowing mud of the road. They saw forms with bipod-braced autoweapons sprawled here and there in the tangles of rotting cornstalks. Quesada’s militiamen wore black fatigues and black web-gear. Some wore black vinyl raincoats and hats. One man stood on the rise, watching the mountain road for headlights.
Tire tracks cut across the abandoned fields to the farmhouse. A small bus, out of view of the road, parked against the rear of the burned-out house; the overhang of the roof sheltered the passenger door from the downpour. The driver’s window viewed the hills. Inside the bus, a cigarette lighter flared.
Lightning flashes revealed a man in a black raincoat walking through the storm. He went from position to position, crouching for a moment with each rifleman. Finally, he disappeared into the darkness of the farmhouse.
“That’s the leader,” Lyons whispered to his partner. “Checking his squad.”
“Perhaps…” Blancanales answered. “And perhaps the leader sent out a soldier to check the line.”
While Blancanales whispered orders to Ricardo, Lyons checked his weapons and gear. He slung his Atchisson over his back and cinched the sling tight. He tightened his bandolier of 12-gauge mags. Checking the MU-50G controlled-effect grenades in his thigh pockets, he felt the casings click together. He reached out to the ferns around him and pulled off fronds. He shoved them in his thigh pockets as padding to eliminate any chance of the grenades betraying him as he moved.
Blancanales went first, Lyons following. The rain pattered on their backs as they snaked through the furrows. They went down the slope, losing sight of the squad and the bus. Cornstalks blocked their line-of-sight. But the cornstalks also screened them from the vision of Quesada’s assassins.
Warm mud coated the fronts of their blacksuits. Lubricated with the black slime, they slid through tangles of rotting cornstalks.
Lyons noticed a detail that would have meant nothing to him before his mission to Guatemala only months before: the corn had not been harvested. He felt the rat-gnawed cobs roll under his hands. The campesino who had sown this field and tended the corn for months had lost the harvest to the war. As he continued toward the bullet-pocked and burned-out house, Lyons wondered if the campesino had also lost his life to the war.
