Without hesitating she aimed my gun at my forehead. A cool breeze tugged at her long red hair, playing it around her shoulders. I looked up at the dark end of the barrel. She steadied the gun with both hands and pulled the trigger.
Click.
She stared down at the weapon, amazement on her face. Then she dropped it on the ground. I reached out my hand to her.
"You see, Lilya, we're not in Moscow yet."
The anger faded into amusement. She threw her head back and laughed at herself; then she took my hand and crawled back into the bedroll.
Chapter Eleven
Belkev was bloated with a hangover. He pushed aside the canned Russian peaches and demanded another cup of coffee. If there's one thing you can get in South America that's good, it's coffee.
"After just one more day of driving and a train ride to Santiago, I will be rid of you," he told me arrogantly.
"That's too bad. I thought we were becoming fast friends. That's the whole charm of a trip like this."
His mouth moved as if to say something in reply but his brain didn't function. Scowling, he lowered his jowly face over his cup.
"I shouldn't give you any," Rosa said as she held a steaming mug before me.
"Why not?"
"You know why not." She glared at Lilya. The redhead had reverted to her KGB mold. It was as if the night before had never happened, her eyes told me.
"Don't be angry," I told Rosa as she relented and gave me the cup. "I was busy last night keeping the MIRistas away."
"There weren't any MIRistas."
See.
The bodyguards returned from their tour of the trail leading out of camp. Their chief sat down next to me.
"We can pack everything into the cars as soon as the minister has finished his breakfast. R's a long ride but at the station a special train will be awaiting us. We should have no trouble from there on.
"Fine."
He studied me for a second before he got up to help the others dismantle the tents.
"I told her she wouldn't get anything, Carter," he said, looking down at me.
"But you're wrong, she did."
I let him take that any way he wanted to and went back to my coffee. As I set the mug on the table, I felt the faintest vibration run through my fingers. Just a tremble from some faraway earthquake, I thought. Chile was full of them.
"The condors are out early today," Greta observed.
"That's a cheery thought to take on the ride ahead," Lilya answered.
The tremble I felt in the table was growing stronger. I searched the sky; I didn't see any condors. But I did see a jet plane bearing down on us fast. The only reason I could see it was that in the flat desert the eye could cover fifteen miles of sky in any direction. The chief bodyguard had also seen it and he was running toward me.
"Down! Everybody get down," he yelled.
The Cuban girls stood up and waved their handkerchiefs at the plane as it drew near. Belkev raised his bloodshot eyes with a total lack of interest.
The plane came over us low, one wing dipped. The table rattled in response to the roar of the engines, a roar that drowned out our shouts. It barreled by and climbed into the sky.
"American," the bodyguard said. "A Starfighter."
"What kind of a plane was that?" Belkev asked after the answer. "It looked more like a missile than a plane."
"Starfighter," his bodyguard repeated.
"It had Chilean Air Force markings on the tail. I'd heard that we were turning some Starfighters over to Chile. Trust the Defense Department to keep on selling its planes even when its customers have gone Red."
"It's obvious," Belkev said. "They sent the plane out to guard us. It's about time too."
The jet crossed overhead at a high altitude.
"I radioed in this morning. The Army said nothing about a plane," the bodyguard complained.
"So what? You can radio them now and thank them. Go on."
The bodyguard walked over to the Land Rover that had the transmitter, shaking his head. Belkev dabbed his lips with a paper napkin.
"See? It's coming back now," he said with great self-satisfaction.
The Starfighter had lost altitude and was sweeping back down the desert toward the camp, preparing to pass directly over us. Everybody was standing and waving. The Starfighter dipped its nose and tilted down toward us. This was the point at which my thoughts jelled. Nobody sends Starfighters out as cover aircraft. The Starfighter is a highly specialized bomber/fighter, a fuel guzzler, an attack plane.
"Dive, everybody dive!" I yelled.
Plumes of dust twenty feet high began to cover the ground a hundred yards away. Pretty spangles of light gleamed from the plane's cannon. Belkev stood gaping, directly in the middle of the flight path.
I bowled him out of the way with a block a Minnesota Viking would have been proud of. He landed heavily on his back and rolled under the table. I scrambled to reach the protection of a dismantled tent. The ground we were lying on, crawling, hugging, erupted under the stitchwork of 20 mm. shells. Through the smoke I saw the table over Belkev go flying through the air. The girls' screams emerged through the thunder the Starfighter's engine made as the jet pulled away from us.
The whole center of the camp was torn apart by the strafing. I ran over to Belkev and discovered that his luck was still holding. He was cowering in the fetal position, untouched. One of his bodyguards had not been as lucky. We found his body crumpled on torn-up ground, a gun in his hand unfixed.
"You Americans are behind this!" Belkev yelled.
"Shut up."
He grabbed my shirt and started to flail at me. I slipped under an inefficient right and held on to him with a half-Nelson. By this time the chief bodyguard returned from the Land Rover, looking puzzled.
"The Air Force sent no plane out."
"Well, they're sending one now, aren't they?" I wanted to know.
"Yes. But it will be ten minutes before they can have anything here. They say we will have to hold on."
The tacit point was that we had as much chance against the Starfighter as an ant has against a shoe. The only reason we hadn't been wiped out on the first run was that the strafing had commenced too soon and scattered us. Even now we heard the whine of the engine as it lost altitude and the plane began its second attack. I shoved Belkev into the bodyguard's arms.
"Here it comes!" Greta screamed.
I had to talk fast so they could hear me before my voice was drowned out in the jet's throaty roar.
"There's a rill fifty yards to the left where we can get some protection. Run for it when I say 'go.' I'm going to be bringing up the rear with this." I shook my left arm and the stiletto dropped into my hand. "This is for anybody who falls back. Okay, here he is. Go!"
The trail of dusty plumes began to cover the camp again, working its way directly at us. For a moment the group stood hypnotized like an animal awaiting the strike of a cobra. Then, as I brandished my knife, it broke and everyone ran pell-mell for the rill. The trouble was that no matter how fast we ran, it was not fast enough to escape the nightmare that followed us. The air itself was churning from the force of the heavy lead raining through it. Geysers of dust reached me, bracketing my footsteps. Bonita fell down and I picked her up without stopping my stride. We couldn't see the others for the falling dirt and we were still stumbling forward when we fell into the rill. When I looked up, I saw that the Starfighter was nearly a mile past the camp and climbing for another pass.
"Is everybody here?" I called out.
A chorus of terrified voices answered me but no one seemed to be hurt.
"Are we safe here?" Greta quavered.
"Don't be a fool," Lilya snapped. "On his next pass, this dirt will crumble like dust. Then on his next pass, he will kill us."
"There are the trucks," Greta cried hysterically, pointing at the Land Rovers. "Why didn't we run for the trucks?"
"Because it's a lot easier to hit a truck than it is to hit a running man. T
he trucks would only be deathtraps," I told her.
The rill wasn't much better than that. The pilot of the Starfighter had cut his turn shorter this time, as though he were gaining confidence. Already he was bearing down on us again but this time he held off on his cannon until we were looking almost directly into the cockpit. One of the bodyguards began to squeeze off shots and I had to reach out and yank him back into the cover of the trench.
"You're not going to bother him with that," I yelled but my words were lost in the rattle of the plane's cannon. The whole side of the rill blew up under the fire. Chunks of earth flew a hundred feet into the air. We were covered in a shower of debris. When the cloud of dirt finally cleared, there was nothing left of the earth bulwark. The arm of the bodyguard I was holding was soaked in blood. He cursed in Russian.
I crawled over to Belkev.
"Give me your vest."
"Never. Go away."
There wasn't time to argue. I drove a fist into his jaw and watched his eyes roll back. Then I stripped the vest from him. As I was putting it on, Lilya grabbed the bodyguard's gun and aimed it straight between my eyes.
"Where do you think you're going?" she snarled at me.
"Hold it, Lilya. The next pass will be the last one unless we do something fast. I'm going over to the jeep and I'm going to need this thing a hell of a lot more than he does."
She glanced at the jeep sitting back at the camp. It was a good distance away but I had remembered the light machine gun that was mounted on the rear.
"You wouldn't have a chance," she said.
"Maybe not, but a little action will give us some time until the other planes arrive. Who here can drive a jeep?"
Lilya lowered the gun and shook her head. The bodyguard growled that he could have had he the use of both arms. Then Rosa and Bonita spoke up.
"We drove one all the time when we were in the Women's Militia."
"Well, if we ever get out of this alive, you can thank Fidel for me."
The Starfighter was coming in with less speed this time and from a different angle, one that would carry it the length of the rill instead of across it. Anyone caught in its range would be a mouse in a trap.
"Come on!"
We jumped out of the trench and ran across the torn-up ground. The jet's wings momentarily wobbled with indecision as the pilot spotted us. Even at the lower speed he was traveling at three hundred mph and didn't have much time in which to make up his mind. We took advantage of our surprise appearance and ran in a straight line rather than zigzagging. From behind us the noise of the jet's engines grew louder. I waited for its cannon to blow us off the face of the earth.
The Starfighter wheeled to the right and to the left, first spraying us and then spitting at the people in the rill. But its momentary hesitation had hurt and it was too late to get a good bead on us. Frustrated now, its angle lost, it climbed steeply, becoming only a dot in the sky.
We leaped into the jeep, the girls piling in the front seat and me in the back. The keys were in the ignition and Rosa had the motor running smoothly while I fed a plastic belt of ammunition into the machine gun. As I worked, I gave her directions on where to start driving when the Starfighter returned for the kill.
"We are going to have a bullfight, yes?" Bonita called out to me.
"Exactamente."
The jet turned furiously toward the camp. There was no doubt — it was headed straight for us. At the last possible moment I touched Rosa on the shoulder and the jeep lurched forward. We raced about fifty feet in first gear, then she made a ninety-degree cut to the right and double-clutched into third and we were off.
The Starfighter hung in back of us. I could sense the growing rage of its pilot. The fighter was equipped with air-to-air missiles that were useless against us. He had wasted precious time already and other Chilean jets were bound to have scrambled by now. Still, he had cannon and a rack of five-hundred-pound bombs, and that was overkill if ever I saw it.
Rosa was skillful. The jeep used every undulation of the desert's hard ground to throw his sight off, a fact that also made things difficult for me, for now I was looking directly into the approaching nose of the jet. I rattled off ten inches of the belt as I bounced around in the rear of the jeep. The plane never wavered.
A wake of geysers shot up behind us.
"Right, turn right!"
The pattern of dust plumes crept close to the tires and spewed in the air, making it impossible for me to see what I was shooting at.
"Left!"
The jeep leaped as a shell took off part of its chassis but the trail of exploding earth curved away from us as the jet screamed past. I was just starting to breathe again when the whole desert seemed to blow up. I hadn't seen him release the bombs from his rack. A heavy stone careened into my chest; only the armored vest prevented it from coming out my back. Miraculously Rosa kept the jeep moving while the machine gun spun on its mount and I lay dazed on the floor.
"He's back, Nick!"
The Starfighter was cutting its turns sharper and lower, covering the desert floor near the speed of sound. I was barely standing when the pilot squeezed the flight stick and the cannon once again began hammering on the desert as the fighter approached us. Rosa turned the wheel sharply to the right and held it there, wheeling the jeep in a circle.
"No! Cut the other way."
We were headed directly into the tide of bullets that were sweeping at us. The jeep's windshield was shattered by a flying rock and the vehicle screeched on two wheels as we sailed through the line of fire. The Starfighter immediately banked into another turn to bring the rain of death back over us.
The jet's cannon was an MK 11, a twin-barreled, air-cooled, gas-and-recoil-operated automatic weapon that fired electrically primed 20 mm ammo from an 8-chamber revolving cylinder. It was all quite a change after confrontation with an Indian swinging a bola. The time it took for the pilot's trigger to fire the shell was one three-thousandth of a second. That's what's called instantaneous reaction. The only edge we had lay in the reaction time between the pilot's brain and his finger on the trigger. I could probably halve that time. The problem was that unless I hit him — or a fuel line — the fire I had available would have about as much effect as a hard rain. The Starfighter was a hell of a plane.
"Rosa, how are you?" I suddenly asked.
"Scared, Nick. When are the other planes going to be here?"
Not in time, I knew that now. The pilot should have finished us off long ago, and our luck wouldn't run forever.
"Just do as I say. Keep the jeep at thirty until he's on top of us, then cut right and step on the gas. You won't be able to hear me when he gets too close so just keep turning away from the direction of the bullets. He's going to come in really low and slow this time."
That's just what he did, cutting over the ground no higher than fifty feet so that he could get the longest angle possible. I braced my feet and let loose with the machine gun. I could just about see the shells dancing off the Starfighter's nose. He returned the fire smothering us in the dust of his lead, each bullet capable of piercing the jeep from side to side. Rosa cut the wheel desperately as the plane kept on coming in, the pilot throttling back hard and hugging the trigger. From the bomb rack two tear drops could be seen as they spiraled through the air. Bonita screamed. The jeep's rear wheels slipped and spun on the ground as Rosa tried to turn away from the falling cylinders.
One bomb landed fifty yards away; the other one was just about in our laps. The jeep was tossed up in the air like it might have been a toy car. It came down on its side, throwing us out like dolls, and kept on bouncing. My vision turned red as I groped to my feet; I wiped the blood out of my eyes. Rosa and Bonita were half-buried in earth and Rosa was bleeding from her ears after the concussion of five hundred pounds of explosive. They were both alive — but not for long. I don't know how much time I'd lost dazed on the ground but the Starfighter was making its last turn for the final coup de grace.
I raced ov
er to the jeep. It had settled on its wheels. The windshield had been sheared off and the machine gun was bent double. I jumped behind the wheel and switched on the key. On the second twist the motor turned over. Bless all the boys who make jeeps, I muttered out loud. I'd gone a distance of one foot when I realized that something else was drastically wrong. The right front wheel was gone. Not blown. Missing.
"Okay, flyboy, it's just you and me now. I hope you don't mind going in circles."
It zoomed over the desert like a gigantic mechanical condor sweeping in for the pickings. I cut to the right and held the wheel. Had I as much as tried to go to the left, the vehicle would have rolled over. The lace of 22 mm shells spun by the Starfighter's Gatling picked up behind me. With every bump the right front end of the jeep slammed off the hard ground. Now the bullfight had really started. Maybe I was crazy, I told myself, but suddenly I was sure I had this bull.
The Starfighter is one of the most sophisticated planes ever produced — so sophisticated, in fact, that many pilots won't fly it. In West Germany they call it the Widowmaker. The plane is built along the lines of a missile; the fuselage is thick and snub, the wings are razor-sharp and short. Take your hands off the controls of any other plane and it will glide on the aerodynamic lift of its wings. The Starfighter has all the glide pattern of a brick, which is the reason it was given such a powerful engine. I already knew by the fact of my very survival that this pilot was eager but inexperienced. As I had been told earlier, the MIRistas were just starting to infiltrate the Chilean Air Force. The man who was trying to gun me down must have been one of the first to enter. He was using one of the best hammers in the world to kill an ant — but in his hands it was a hammer that could backfire.
I curled around inside his line of fire, ignoring the cannon. Once, then twice, the jeep shook as he hit home. The ricocheting shells bounced around inside the chassis, some of them striking my vest like Death trying to claim my attention. I felt the dry heat of the afterburner as he climbed away. The bull was ready.
With the jeep's motor running, I sat still on three wheels as he returned. I was secure in the grim knowledge that — one way or another — our war was going to end now. The pilot knew it too. Two miles away he was throttling back, setting me in his sights, easing down at a relative creep of two hundred fifty mph.
The Inca Death Squad Page 9
