Tyranny in the Ashes

by William W. Johnstone

  “I don’t give a shit about their reasons,” Loco spat. “I want to know if they are spies.”

  “I’m not a spy,” Arnoldo said, turning away from Grimes’s dead body. “I’m only following orders. I swear it.”

  Loco gave Strunk a glance. “Prepare the radio. We shall see if the man is speaking true words. If he is not, I will kill him myself. Take the other one outside and bury him. Remove any papers he has in his pockets and bring them to me.”

  THIRTEEN

  Esmeralda Soto heard them coming, the sounds of gasoline motors grinding through the jungle. She came out of her palm hut to see who was driving the jungle road to their village. It was never good when a motorized vehicle came this way, for it was almost always soldiers who were looking for someone, or bandits coming to loot the village of what little they had in the way of food and clothing. Or to take away the young women who had no children.

  Reynaldo had been acting strangely since the American man and woman came, the woman who appeared to be una india by her facial features. She and Reynaldo and Jose whispered among themselves too often while she was here, and even Anna noticed the change in Jose after she and her companion went to their hut at the edge of the village.

  “Come inside,” Esmeralda said to her five-year-old son as he was playing in the dirt not far from their hut. Carlos had his father’s eyes. When she looked at little Carlos she saw Reynaldo when he was younger.

  Carlos looked up. “But why, Mama?”

  “Someone is coming up the mountain. I need to tell Anna we have visitors. Take your sister and go inside. It may be the soldiers.”

  Carlos got up and dusted off his knees. “Come, Rosita,” he said to a tiny naked girl playing in the mud beside him. “Mama says it is time to go.”

  Esmeralda watched the jungle trail, shading her eyes from the sun with a hand. The noises made by the engines grew much louder. It would be soldiers coming, for the village was too far off main roads to be visited by anyone else.

  In the past, rebel soldiers from Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador had come to loot Belizian villages, looking for wild pig meat and fruit gathered by the mountain tribes. The tribes had so little and yet the soldiers came anyway, often shooting down tribal elders and anyone else who voiced a protest to the banditry.

  But when Comandante Perro Loco took charge in Belize, most of the bandit gangs were killed off, or sent into hiding. The Mad Dog, as his name implied, killed anyone and everyone who stood in his way when he took command of the country. Some saw him as a Belizian hero . . . Esmeralda was not so sure. She wished with all her heart that Reynaldo had not become a guard at the Mad Dog’s headquarters in San Ignacio. He had changed so much in the months since he went to work as a hacienda guard. He hardly spoke to her now. They needed the money from his job, especially if they ever hoped to pay for Rosita’s operation, but Esmeralda worried that harm might come to her husband if he had a job guarding the comandante.

  Anna, a slender Caribe Belizian girl with three children, came running from the jungle with an armload of breadfruit as she cast a worried look over her shoulder. She was only eighteen, too young to understand the political things going on in the capital city. And she was pretty, making her vulnerable to the soldiers’ demands.

  “Who comes?” Anna asked, stopping in front of Esmeralda’s hut.

  “Soldiers, or bandidos,” Esmeralda replied, still watching the jungle road. “Take your children inside and keep them there until we know who it is. Do not come outside for any reason until they are gone.”

  “Why have Jose and Reynaldo not come home?” Anna asked. “I expected them last night.”

  Esmeralda continued to stare at the road. “I do not know. Something may be wrong.”

  Anna dropped the sack of breadfruit and raced for her hut to grab her children. Down deep, Esmeralda had a feeling that the motor sounds meant trouble for the villagers.

  Coop stuck his head out of the hut he and Jersey were sharing as soon as he heard the growling of engines from the jungle.

  He whirled and ducked back inside the hut. “Pack our shit as fast as you can, Jersey. Sounds like company’s on the way.”

  Jersey quickly rolled up her bedroll and stuffed it in her pack as Coop did the same with his stuff. “You think it could be El Gato coming to tell us the hit went okay?” she asked.

  “Uh-uh. Those motors sound like jeeps, an’ Gato drives a pickup. I’m very much afraid the shit’s hit the fan, an’ if we don’t get a move on, it’s gonna splatter all over us.”

  “What about the villagers?” Jersey asked as they pulled their packs on, picked up their weapons, and melted into the jungle.

  Coop shook his head. “Whatever happens to them, it’ll go a lot worse on ’em if the soldiers find us hiding here. Get a move on!”

  Sergeant Felipe Garza directed his driver toward the center of the village. A tripod-mounted fifty-caliber machine gun bolted to the rear floor was manned by Lupe Ozaro.

  Garza signaled the drivers of the other vehicles to remain on the periphery of the village to guard their backs until they saw what they were up against. Loco had said there might be some foreigners stationed here and to be careful.

  More than two dozen grass huts stood in the clearing on a high jungle mountainside. Garza saw no evidence of armed resistance, so he had his driver proceed further into the village.

  “Alto!” Felipe shouted.

  The jeep ground to a halt.

  Sergeant Garza jumped to the ground with his pistol drawn.

  “Where is the wife of Reynaldo Soto?” he cried. “The wife of Jose Villareal?”

  A small woman in a tattered cotton dress came slowly from the doorway in one of the huts.

  “Who are you?” Felipe demanded.

  “Esmeralda. Esmeralda Soto.”

  Felipe strode across the clearing with his gun pointed at the woman. “Your husband? Where is he?”

  “He . . . is a guard at the hacienda of Comandante Perro Loco in San Ignacio.”

  Felipe smiled. “Yes. I know that. He is dead! He tried to assassinate the comandante.”

  Esmeralda shook her head, her hands to her face and sudden tears springing to her eyes. “No. Reynaldo would not do such a thing.”

  The tears streamed down her cheeks. Sergeant Garza found her tears amusing. “He was a traitor! So was his friend from this village, Jose Villareal. They were killed when they tried to kill our commander. Tell me, bitch, why they would do something like this?”

  “It is not true . . . it cannot be true.”

  “It is la verdad. They are both dead. Now tell me . . . who would pay them to do such a thing?”

  “No one,” Esmeralda whispered. “Reynaldo was a good father and a good husband.”

  “He was a murderer!” Felipe snapped.

  “No. He has never killed anyone in his life.”

  Felipe glanced around him. “Where is the wife of Jose Villareal?”

  Esmeralda’s eyes flickered to the front door of Jose’s hut. “There,” she said softly.

  Felipe turned to Corporal Lupe Ozaro. His eyes were hard, flat and uncaring. “Fire into the hut. Kill them!”

  Before Esmeralda could scream a warning, the heavy chatter of machine-gun fire echoed across the village. Palm fronds erupted from the walls, tossed into the air by the power of lead slugs, shredding coconut leaves into pulp.

  A child screamed as the hut was being cut to pieces by the hail of bullets.

  Esmeralda sank to her knees, covering her face with her hands, sobbing uncontrollably.

  The shooting ended. Sergeant Garza grinned. “Now do you believe me, bitch?” he snarled. “Unless you tell me who paid your husband and his friend to assassinate Comandante Perro Loco, you and the others in this village will die.”

  Esmeralda sobbed. “I do not know. I swear it. There was this woman . . . una india, only she spoke English. She came here with a man, un americano.”

  “These americanos . . . who were they
?”

  “They did not give their names. They talked to Reynaldo and Jose in private,” she said, not even considering adding that El Gato Selva had also been there.

  “What did they talk about?” Felipe demanded.

  Esmeralda peered through her fingers when Anna came crawling out the door of her hut with blood covering her tattered dress. Her leg dangled behind her at an odd angle. Inside the hut the sounds of children crying filled the village.

  “I do not know,” Esmeralda cried.

  “You lying bitch!” Felipe hissed, his teeth clenched when he spoke. “Tell me the truth or I will blow a hole through your head.”

  “I swear I do not know!” she screamed, looking around her as if she might find help from the other villagers. She saw no one. Everyone else in the small village was hiding behind closed doors.

  Felipe cocked his automatic pistol, aiming down at the cowering woman. “This is your last chance to tell me what the woman said, and who she was.”

  “She . . . gave Reynaldo something. Later on that night he went out and buried it behind our house. This is all I know. I swear it on the lives of my children.”

  Anna Villareal rolled off the steps into her hut and landed on the ground. Felipe turned his gun on her and fired a thundering round.

  His bullet split Anna’s skull in half. Her limbs jerked with death throes. Her broken leg thrashed helplessly behind her.

  A small boy, no more than ten or twelve months old, came crawling to the door of the hut, staring down at his dying mother.

  Sergeant Garza fired at the boy. The bullet went through his spine, flipping him over on his back as a shrill scream came from his lips.

  “Now do you believe me?” Felipe asked, aiming his weapon down at Esmeralda. “Tell me who the americana bitch was, or you will die . . . and all your children will die!”

  “She did not say her name!” Esmeralda pleaded. “I swear I am telling the truth!”

  “Lying bitch!” he whispered. “What did your husband bury behind your house.”

  “I do not know.”

  “Show me where it is buried.”

  Anna Villareal strangled on blood and lay still as Esmeralda got to her feet.

  “It is beneath a clay pot where we boil our sugarcane and yam roots. Please do not kill my children . . .”

  She led him to the pot behind the hut, where a bed of ashes surrounded the base of a bowl.

  “Are you sure it was here?” Felipe demanded.

  “Yes. Yes. Reynaldo did not know I was watching him that night when he dug the hole.”

  Felipe walked over to the fire-blackened clay pot and gave it a closer examination. “I will have Corporal Ozaro dig it up,” he said. “If there is nothing under it, I will kill you.”

  Sergeant Garza motioned for Lupe Ozaro to climb down from the Jeep.

  Esmeralda crept backward, resting on her knees.

  “Dig here,” Felipe instructed.

  Esmeralda closed her eyes.

  Lupe Ozaro found a handful of gold American coins wrapped in a cloth at the bottom of the firepit. He gave them to Sergeant Garza.

  Felipe turned abruptly and fired a bullet into Esmeralda’s chest, slamming her over onto her back in the jungle grass.

  “Let us go now,” Felipe said, pocketing the coins. He would have to tell the comandante that the story about Reynaldo and Jose working for the Americans to assassinate him was true, but he would not mention the gold.

  The gold would remain in Felipe’s pocket. After all, it was more than he could make in several years in the service of Perro Loco, and the gold would buy the favors of many señoritas.

  He stopped, looking down at Esmeralda.

  “Por favor, do not kill me,” she begged as bloody froth bubbled from her lips.

  “I have no choice,” Felipe said. “You saw me dig up the gold.”

  “I did not see anything.”

  “I wish I could believe you,” Felipe told her. “I do not like killing women.”

  “I saw nothing,” she stammered, coughing and holding her chest. “I have two small children who need me . . . now that I know Reynaldo will . . . not be coming home to us.”

  “As you wish,” Felipe said, turning as if he meant to return to the jeep.

  “Gracias, señor,” Esmeralda replied, trying to get to her feet, swaying from the pain in her chest where the bullet had entered. “There would be no one else to care for my children.”

  “I understand,” Felipe remarked.

  As he was rounding a corner of the hut, he wheeled and aimed his pistol at the woman. The bark of his weapon ended the quiet in the clearing.

  Esmeralda Soto fell over on her back with a dark red hole in her forehead. The secret of the location of the gold coins was now between Felipe and Lupe Ozaro and their driver.

  Just as Lupe climbed into the jeep, two more gunshots rang out in the forest.

  Sergeant Garza did not intend to share his fortune with anyone else. He pushed Lupe’s and the driver’s bodies out of the jeep and drove off, already making plans on how he would explain the deaths of his companions to the others waiting in the jungle.

  He would blame the americanos, saying they attacked them from hiding. He would order a search of the village in order to prove to Perro Loco that he was thorough in his assignment and that he had tried his best to avenge the deaths of Lupe and his driver.

  Who knows? he thought. They might even find evidence of the americanos’ presence in the village.

  FOURTEEN

  Coop had to physically restrain Jersey when the fat sergeant ordered his man to fire into Jose’s hut. She put her M-16 to her shoulder, and would have blown the shit out of him if Coop hadn’t stopped her.

  “What’s the matter with you, Coop?” she demanded angrily. “There’s only three of them in the village. We can take them easily.”

  He shook his head. “I heard at least four or five jeeps, Jersey. The rest are covering the sergeant’s back. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “But . . .” she started to say as the sound of machine-gun fire shattered the quiet in the jungle, causing a flock of fruit bats to take wing over their heads.

  “Goddammit!” she whispered hoarsely. “That son of a bitch is gonna kill them all.”

  Coop gritted his teeth until his jaws ached. It galled him to stand by and do nothing, but it would do no good for him and Jersey to be killed and it certainly wouldn’t protect the villagers.

  “Hang on, Jers,” he said, his voice tight. “We’ll get our time at bat and we’ll make the bastards pay, but now’s not the time.”

  After Sergeant Felipe Garza shot his men, he jumped in the jeep and spun his tires, fishtailing in the soft dirt of the jungle floor as he raced out of the village.

  He slid to a stop when he got to where the rest of his command was waiting just inside the thick foliage of the surrounding forest.

  Corporal Beto, his second in command, stood up in his jeep, his hands on the fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on a post in the vehicle.

  “What happened, Felipe?” he asked. “We heard shooting but got no call on the radio requesting help.”

  “Americanos!” Garza shouted. “They ambushed us. There was no time to radio.”

  Beto saw the blood on the seats of the jeep Garza was driving. “And Lupe and Jose?” he asked, referring to Garza’s driver.

  “Killed,” Garza answered shortly. “I managed to drive the americanos back, but they may still be in the village. I want a complete search of every hut. Spare no one if you find evidence they were helping the americanos.”

  Beto waved his arm, and the other four jeeps pulled into the village, just in time to see the last of the villagers fleeing into the jungle. No one was left behind.

  The search didn’t take long; the buildings were all too small to hide anyone. When they came to the hut Coop and Jersey had been in, Garza stooped and picked up two empty MRE packets, holding them aloft for the others to see.

 
“The americanos were here, just as I said. I will radio Comandante Loco to see if he wants us to search the jungle or to return to base.”

  After informing Loco of the presence of Americans in the jungle, Garza was ordered to return to base. Loco said other men better equipped for a jungle search would be sent to apprehend the traitors. He needed Garza to bring the aircraft fuel they’d picked up on their way into the jungle as soon as they could, for it would be needed in the upcoming offensive against the Mexican government.

  * * *

  Sergeant Felipe Garza rode at the front of the procession as they crossed jungle mountains toward San Ignacio and Loco’s hacienda. Five trucks with men loyal to the comandante drove the vehicles. The trucks loaded with aircraft fuel would be a star in his crown, a way to earn a promotion, as would his finding out that Americans were indeed involved in the recent assassination attempt on Loco’s life. The airplanes, especially the helicopters Comandante Perro Loco had, were in good mechanical shape, but they lacked the fuel to fly across Mexico to achieve the objectives the comandante wanted as he led his forces north to conquer the North Americans.

  Corporal Beto spoke, still gripping the fifty-caliber machine gun with both hands while they moved through the jungle. “The comandante will be pleased,” he said. “The fuel will be very important.”

  Felipe knew the comandante would be more than pleased to have the fuel he sought so desperately. “Yes. When we get to San Ignacio to show him what we have found, he may give us all a small bonus. He was very pleased that we chased the americanos into the jungle.”

  “I could use the money,” Beto said. “My family is almost starving.”

  “Many people are hungry in Central America,” Garza said as the jeep rolled over a hillside. “We are among the lucky ones who have jobs.”

  “But this . . . job,” Beto argued, “it does not pay much and we don’t get our money very often.”

  “Silencio!” Garza said, glancing down at the driver, a Salvadoran named Julio Corte who spoke very little English. “If someone close to the comandante hears you say this, you will be executed by his bodyguards.”