Wet Work

by Christopher Buckley

  He stood beside Charley, keeping his eyes on the Indians. "I've got someone on the line," he said. "Untermeyer found him through the Smithsonian. It's three A.M. his time. I explained it as much as I could. I thought you should speak to him. His name is Tierney. Untermeyer says he's an ethnographer."

  "Ethnographer," Charley repeated in the dreamy tone of voice everyone was using, for fear a single hard consonant would spark the charged air inside Esmeralda's salon and turn it into a combustion chamber. "An ethnographer is someone…"

  "He knows about Amazon Indians."

  "Okay," said Charley. "Let's see just what he knows." He took the phone from Felix and punched the "hold" button and said in his Monday-morning voice, "Sorry to barge into your sleep like this, Mr. Tierney, but I got a little situation here could use some ethnographizing. I don't know what my associate here told you, but it boils down to I got about a dozen extremely hostile Indians here in my living room all making eyes at a piece of moving art I got on board, sculpture with lights in it, and they look like they're hunkered in for the wet season… How do I know they're hostile? One of my people's dead with a dart sticking out of him… No, they weren't provoked… I appreciate that, but the deforestation of the Amazon is not the issue here, Mr. Tierney. I happen to be a life member of the Sierra Club. Anyway, it was about to get worse when one of 'em started shouting, 'Soo-gi' and the rest of them went running in like they heard Elvis Presley was back from the dead and giving a free concert… I really couldn't spell it for you, Mr. Tierney… Uh-huh, uh-huh… Same linguistic group. You're saying they are the headhunters or they're related to the headhunters?"

  "What?" said Felix.

  "Related. All right, then. Good. Fine. Great." Charley cupped the phone and said, "They're just related… Yeah, I'm here. All right, you know what soo-gi means?… Uh-huh, uh-huh… Well, it's about five foot high, looks like a stele, you know, one of those stone deals they used to put on a dead warrior, got a motor in it runs light through fiber optics, does patterns… What kind of patterns? Patterns, like, I don't know. Right now it's doin' like a rainbow and they're moanin' and groanin'… Yeah, I can hold."

  Eladio said to his son Zacari, "How do you think it works?"

  "Tierney? You there?… Don't fall asleep on me now, we're almost finished."

  Rostow, Mac, Bundy and Hot Stick were standing by with their weapons pointed at the congregation of Aguaruna as casually as it could be done without being rude, trying to provide comfort for Felix, who crouched next to the Stele, perspiring heavily over a soldering iron, a converter and a picnic cooler full of two dozen size-D batteries. The batteries were all soldered together in series. He soldered a wire from the negative end of the first battery and ran it to the converter, then attached another wire from the positive nipple of the last battery to the converter. The Indians seemed to regard his ministrations as unobtrusive, but the real test was coming.

  "Ready," said Felix.

  Charley said, "Everybody ready?" He saw Hot Stick reaching for one of his grenades. "No, Hot Stick."

  "I've got to pull the hundred and ten plug before I can hook up the DC bank," said Felix.

  "How long is that going to take?"

  "I don't know, boss."

  "All right, it's all right."

  "I'm not an electrician," said Felix.

  "I sure as hell hope you are," said Bundy.

  "Okay," said Charley, "here we go. Don't shoot me, boys." He waded into their midst and stood in front of the Stele so as to block their view of it and addressed himself to Shotgun, sitting in the front row.

  "On behalf of everyone, I'd just like to say what a real pleasure it's been to have you all visit with us…"

  Felix pulled the plug. The Stele went dead. The Indians gasped.

  "It was specially nice that you all could take the time to kill all of my crew, except for these gentlemen here…"

  Shotgun was on his feet with an angry look.

  "And I think I can speak for them when I say how pleased they are that you decided not to kill them as well…"

  Shotgun aimed his weapon. It was about to end in a mutual massacre, an exchange of double-ought buckshot,.455 and.385, frog darts and bamboo blades, and before it was over Hot Stick would probably toss in one of his grenades just to make sure no one survived, when all of a sudden a fireworks display lit up the surface of the Stele.

  The Indians sighed. And it was good.

  They lowered it from davits into their longest dugout canoe.

  Shotgun spoke to Charley. "Kurinku pataa," he said. The ethnographer yawned at the other end of the line that kurinku was a corruption of the Spanish gringo. Pataa meant headman.

  The Indians paddled away in the darkness, the Stele upright in the dugout like a weird grandfather clock from another world. A red sun rose on its surface, burst into a fiery dandelion, then fell, streaming in tendrils through the vastness of space, into the black night water of the Huallaga.

  32

  "No. Absolutely not."

  "DEA thought that under the circumstances, since it was their thing-"

  "We've got the Navy, the Marines, the Army, now you want DEA. I knew this was going to happen, Dick. Why don't we just get a 747 to fly them all down there?"

  "It's his case, John."

  "It is not 'his case,' Dick. Not anymore. It's bigger than that now. My God, it's on my desk now."

  "I realize that. It's just that DEA made a, a deal with Diatri."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Without bogging you down in the details, it, basically Diatri got a commitment from, from DEA that he would be in on the, that he would be part of the package."

  "I don't understand. Commitment. Who are we talking about here, a, a GS-12?"

  "Thirteen. He's a Senior Agent. He passed up a promotion to Group Supervisor so he could stay on the beat. DEA says he's good, very good. In fact, you remember the five-ton seizure in Jacksonville?"

  "Of course."

  "The one he went down there for, for the photo op and handshake?"

  "Yes."

  "That was Diatri's bust. Here's the photo of the two of them together. He even signed it for him."

  "He signs photos for everyone, Dick. He's, he's that way. It's the noblesse oblige thing."

  "Right, it's just-"

  "I'm sure he's a fine agent, first-rate, but why the hell does he have to be part of the, the military aspect? Unless he's good with mines, for God's sake."

  "As I understand it, they were about to medical him out on a Disability when he broke the case. He wasn't happy about that and apparently used the fact he'd broken the case as a bargaining chip to get them to keep him on."

  "What kind of shop are they running over there?"

  "A very good shop, John. It's just, the Administrator is very protective of his people. So he made the arrangement with him."

  "Then he made one he wasn't able to keep."

  "The sense I got is that if Diatri isn't part of the package, he's not going to be happy."

  "I'm not in the happiness business, Dick."

  "This is Sensitive City, here, John. I don't think it's going to do us any good if, if, you know, here we are doing the war on drugs and cashiering our front-line soldiers."

  "In a war, if you get wounded, you get sent home. With honor."

  "That's not how he sees it, apparently."

  "I don't give a hoot how he sees it. I never imagined this job would entail haggling with, with GS-13s. It's not dignified, Dick."

  "I hear you. But all they did was tell him he could be in on the package. After that they're, they've got a plan. They're going to stick him in Congressional Relations. Diatri doesn't know that, by the way. They'll tell him that once it's over."

  "Congressional Relations? I would have thought, he looks a little rough-hewn for Congressional Relations."

  "They like that. The rough-hewn look. It plays well."

  "All right, he can go, but that is absolutely it. I don't want anyone else coming i
n here and saying, 'Oh, my Aunt Martha needs to go.'"

  "Fine, right. When are you going to take this down the hall?"

  "When he gets back from fishing."

  "Good thinking."

  "If we get into the banana-peel situation, I'll want you to be point man. Take over, damage-control it."

  "Me? I would have thought Ray."

  "You and Ray, I mean. I've already explained it to Ray."

  "Uh-huh. What's your thinking as far as my, my being out front?"

  "I don't want this washing up on his doorstep, Dick. We need to create some, some insulation. For his sake."

  "Right."

  "And I'm just down the hall from him, so if my doorstep gets wet, so does his, if you follow."

  33

  Only an hour of light left. Virgilio and Mirko sat dozing in the bucket seats of their respective high-performance boats. Their men lay about the wooden floating dock with their weapons on their stomachs, listening to the same Julio Iglesias tape they had been listening to all day and it was starting to get on his nerves. Eladio and his men should have been back hours ago. The yacht was only ten kilometers downriver from Yenan. Assuming they had made their attack the night before, that would give them more than enough time to be back here.

  "Don't you have something else to play? Something classical?"

  The man closest to the tape player said respectfully, "Si, Niño," and took out the Julio Iglesias and after a thoughtful rumination over the bag of tapes, made a selection to please his patron. Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," sung in Spanish by Charo, filled the muggy riverine air.

  "Okay, Niño?"

  "Yes," he said, too preoccupied to manage more than slight annoyance. He had in mind Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra or the Asturias of the incomparable Albeniz, who had run away from his home in Spain at the age of nine, stowed away on a boat to Central America and returned home a man of the world at the age of thirteen. He tried to lose himself in the endless permutations of the surface of the water as it tumbled downriver, toward his enemy billonario.

  He felt it happening: the malarial memory coming back at him again. He was back on that accursed golf course with her father.

  "It's not Amanda who wants to break it off, Antonio. She's terribly fond of you. She's doing it for me. I know you're from a very good family down there, but let's face it, everything's so darn unstable down there. I just wouldn't be happy thinking my daughter was going to be caught up in the midst of some political kafuffle. I don't know about you, but I'm dying for a gin and tonic. What say we head in? I must say, you're being awfully mature about all this, Antonio."

  He wondered, for the sixth or seventh time, if he should have given Eladio a radio. No. Might as well tie a radio to a butterfly.

  He had, however, given Eladio a briefing on the dangers of this particular pistaco. The pistaco mythology went back-as far as anyone could trace-to 1571. It was the Indians' way of explaining the Spanish Conquest. Sendero Luminoso had revived the myth in the 1980s as a way of turning the people against the Army, with tremendous effect. Tales of horror wrought by pistacos were retailed every day. Eladio himself had described to him, in nearly journalistic detail, a slaughter of 30,000 Indians by pistacos, how they had hacked off all their limbs and thrown them into a giant cooking pot and sold the rendered grease to the North Americans for their machines, especially the rockets that they sent into the sky to impregnate the moon and create monster children who would ride back down to earth on the backs of meteors, ghastly, shrieking creatures who vomited hot lava.

  The forest was the cradle of extravagant animism. Eladio's people believed that everything had a soul, often more than one. And yet the legend of the pistaco, the troll-thug who kills to obtain human grease, was hardly peculiar to the Amazon. During World War I the British government's propaganda mechanism insinuated into the public imagination stories of the German "Corpse-Rendering Works," where the dead bodies of fine young English soldiers were melted down to grease German artillery pieces; while across the Channel stories were circulated about the British "Tallow Works" of like ghastliness.

  He had told Eladio not to touch anything on the boat. Everything was possessed-especially the pictures-by iwanchin, the shadow souls who can turn themselves into anything, deer, owl, butterfly, in order to kidnap the children of the Indians.

  Kill them quickly, Eladio, and touch nothing. The boat itself must be disposed of according to certain rituals, which I myself will perform.

  So-where was Eladio? He tried to close his mind off from disturbing images of a firefight aboard the yacht. He saw "The Absinthe Drinker" shot up with holes, Baudelaire's manic eyes peering out from under the brim of his top hat, bursting into flames, the boat rocked by explosions-

  "Esteban!"

  "Si, Niño?"

  "Turn off that shit! I said classical."

  Puzzled, Esteban switched off Charo. The crepuscular sounds of the river reasserted themselves-frog, cricket, beetle, bird-until they were drowned out by an organ version of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing."

  34

  Charley stepped out onto Esmeralda's flight deck wearing his flight suit and.45 snugged in its shoulder holster and took a deep breath. He hadn't slept but a few hours since the Indian attack, and for the first time since it had all begun, he felt his age. It was dark out, an hour to sunrise. Hot Stick was leaning over one of the UAVs-Fat Albert-adding nitromethane to the fuel mixture. Charley's nostrils tingled from the vapors; it woke him up, gave him a little energy charge. The smell was familiar somehow; then he remembered sitting in the back of the limousine with his sinuses full of gun oil, on the way to the morgue with Felix.

  He reached inside the chopper for the radio handset. "Where is everyone?"

  "Grasshopper Three, in position."

  "Grasshopper Four, in position."

  "One and Two, where are you?" Charley said. "State your positions, please."

  Felix's voice came on. "Mac says we're a hundred yards from our position. I think we're lost. I can't see anything. Over."

  Charley said, "Roger that. Stand by. We are preparing to launch." He gave Hot Stick the signal.

  Hot Stick had the leaf blower going, funneling air into the turbines of the Thunderbolt to get them spinning. He held up the spark coil in his other hand and said, "Ready." Charley nodded. He touched the spark coil to the engine. A burst of flame appeared from the afterburner. Charley nodded again; Hot Stick hit the lever release on the catapult and the A-10 shot off Esmeralda's cantilevered flight deck.

  Hot Stick maneuvered the joysticks on one of the five Futaba transmitters, bringing Slow Boy into a holding pattern above Esmeralda. The Futabas were all wired into a Toshiba laptop computer. He switched Slow Boy's controls over to the computer and got ready to launch the two F/A-18s, already positioned in the bow cats. Charley nodded; Hot Stick released the two levers and the Blue Hornets sailed off, climbing effortlessly as if their small size exempted them from gravity's demands, joining Slow Boy.

  Charley and Hot Stick lifted Fat Albert out of its cradle and onto the catapult, gingerly, considering. Hot Stick fired its engine and sent it off. They watched the fireball climb and join the three orange specks circling two hundred feet above.

  Charley was about to say some words he'd memorized from the St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry V when Hot Stick said, "Awesome, huh?" He climbed into the Hughes with his control apparatus and strapped himself in.

  Charley crossed himself. Then he went forward to Esmeralda's flagstaff. He hauled it up the halyard: a red-and-white pennant followed by an "S" pennant, then a "Q" pennant and a "I" pennant. They hung there undramatically in the breezeless pre-dawn air. He climbed into the Hughes and closed the door and started the helicopter's engines.

  "What's with the flags?" Hot Stick shouted over the roar.

  "'I Am Attacking,'" said Charley.

  It is tricky taking off from the small deck of a boat in a helicopter, and Charley was a tad rusty at it. You need to c
reate what's called "ground-effect cover"-the cushion of air that holds the craft up. The moment a helicopter moves off over the water, it's like a trapdoor dropping underneath; you have to put your nose down to gain compensating forward speed.

  Charley powered up to a hundred percent, moved off over the water and then pushed down on the cyclic stick between his legs, which put the chopper's nose down. He overdid it. Suddenly all he could see was river, coming up at him too fast. He pulled back on the collective, increasing the pitch of the rotor blades, and forcing more air over them, giving the craft lift. The skids dipped into the water. They were water-skiing. Finally the skids came out of the water. He gained speed quickly and climbed to a hundred feet.

  "This is Dragonfly," he said into the radio. "I am airborne."

  Hot Stick had lost all his color. Charley said to him, "That's the hardest part, taking off."

  ***

  They were in the boathouse, everyone dozing. Eladio had still not returned.

  Popo's voice came over the radio, loud and excited, "Niño, Niño! I have something on the radar. One definite target and something else, I can't tell, it's not clear."

  "What's the position, the range?"

  "Three kilometers. It's over the river, north of us."

  "Where's Beni?"

  "Asleep."

  "Wake him up. Tell him to get the Stinger ready."

  "Si, Niño. Should I give them a warning?"

  "No. It can't be military. Espinosa always gives us notice ahead of time. Tell Beni to fire. Shoot the first thing he sees."

  "Si, Niño."

  ***