The Viper Squad

by J. B. Hadley

  He left the pickup in the same place he had left it on previous trips and descended the steep side of a gulch down to a dry streambed at its bottom. Cottonwoods, tamarisks and willows grew among sedges and reeds along the banks that contained only smooth bone-dry stones. As Mike followed the gulch, its walls grew steeper and closer together, until finally he was walking along the dry bottom of a cool, dark canyon about as wide as a deer trail. The walls of the canyon were of smooth sandstone and seemed almost to meet far above his head, leaving only a thin strip of blue sky.

  Mike followed this canyon till it joined another wider one, and followed that until it too joined a still larger one almost the width of the two-lane road he had long since left. Some big thunderheads floated in what he could see of the sky. They seemed a long distance off. He had explored this far and up some side canyons on his previous visits. This time he wanted to follow the main canyon, which, unlike the others, narrowed as it went toward the river. As he followed the canyon, the rocks and debris left on its floor made the going hard. He had covered a long, twisting, relatively easy stretch when he stopped to listen.

  The sound was exactly like that of a subway train approaching in a tunnel. Mike felt vibrations in the ground beneath him and a great roar echoed down the canyon. He looked back but saw nothing.

  A huge snake head of red liquid mud suddenly slithered into view along the undercut sandstone wall of the bend behind him. The serpent of mud twisted back into the center of the canyon and shot forward with deadly speed to consume all in its path.

  Mike had time only to rush to the side and scramble on top of some rock debris at the base of one canyon wall. He avoided the direct impact of the flash flood, which would have borne him along, battered him with boulders and ground him up fine along the rocky floor.

  The flood swept by, three or four feet deep and almost up to his boots where he stood on the rocks. Then he felt the rocks shift slightly under him from the force of the muddy water. The canyon wall was smooth above him, without handholds. The rocks beneath his feet shifted again.

  Then the water level rose alarmingly. In seconds, it was above his knees. He hardly had time to think before it was at waist level. Mike decided not to wait to find out which would give way first, him or the rocks beneath, and he hitched a ride on a heavy tree trunk floating down what was now a swift, muddy river. This proved not so easy as he thought it would be. The trunk was old and weathered, without bark or branches—and the water made it slippery to grip and rolled it in his grasp when he did manage to hold on. He cut one hand. This he could tell by the blood on his skin, for he could feel nothing.

  A cottonwood, uprooted by the flood, was carried near him and Mike transferred his hold onto it. Its branches acted like outriggers and prevented the trunk from rolling in the fast-moving waters. He saw two drowned deer float by.

  Mike was a strong swimmer and was not greatly concerned by what was happening until the canyon narrowed further and he was swept down two chutes of water. He knew he was getting into waterfall territory. Even a small waterfall could stun and drown him—and he would have no chance at all in a fall of any size. He managed to twist the cottonwood around at a narrow neck so that it became caught securely between both canyon walls. He clung on and let the water break over him.

  Very soon the water level dropped. Almost as quickly as the river had come into existence, it began to disappear. Mike let himself dry, sitting on the trunk still wedged between the canyon walls but now above the water. When the flow had diminished to a waist-high stream, he jumped down into the water. He shook the cottonwood tree loose and watched its journey downstream. Then he walked back the way he had come on dry ground alongside one canyon wall.

  He climbed beside what was now a ten-foot-high waterfall—it had been a chute when he had passed over it in the headlong rush of deep water—and upstream from that he came across another. This one, about fifteen feet high, was of smooth sandstone and not climbable.

  Perhaps he would find an easier way out by following the canyon down toward the river. He climbed back down the side of the ten-foot waterfall and passed the spot where he had wedged the cottonwood between the canyon walls. If he had not pushed the tree back into the water and watched it float away, he could have hauled it back up the lower waterfall and used it as a ladder against the smooth wall of the upper fall. Why had he pushed the tree back in the water? The cottonwood itself couldn’t have cared less one way or the other, yet it was almost as if he had been apologizing to it for delaying its journey and helping it on its way again.

  Mike continued farther down the canyon along the dry strip by the base of one wall until he came to a dark, misty place where the water disappeared over the lip of yet another fall. Even before reaching it, he could tell by the comparative silence—only a distant muffled plunging of water—that he was not going to like what he was about to see! He peered over the edge.

  The muddy river shot clear of the precipice and descended in a long, wavering spout to smash into foam on rocks more than a hundred feet below. The top of the fall, where Mike stood, was an overhang he could have managed with a climbing rope. Beneath the overhang, the walls were sanded smooth by the abrasives carried along in the water over the ages. Mike turned back.

  When he passed the place again where he had jammed the cottonwood between the canyon was, he was shaken by how close he had gotten to the big fall. His maneuver had been just in time. Then he grew alarmed about his present situation. It might be years before someone came this way and found his bones. By then, more flash floods would probably have carried his bones down the canyons to the river, and from the river into the Gulf of California, to rest on the sea bottom, examined by curious fish, till buried out of sight by settling sediment.…

  His pickup, in perfect condition in the desert climate, would be his memorial, the only clue to what had happened to him.

  He stood for a while, hopelessly, beneath the smooth was of the fifteen-foot fall, the water shrunken now to the size of a brook, and he could hardly believe it when he saw a big tree trunk with snapped-off branches protrude a few feet over the top of the fall and then come to a stop, the flow of water being insufficient to carry it over. The trunk moved again and rolled; a bit more of the heavy trunk stuck out over the top; then it seesawed a little and at last was eased over the edge. The heavy end hit the pool at the base of the fall, and the trunk remained leaning against the top at an angle of forty-five degrees.

  Mike scrambled up it and moved on up the canyon, fast—aware of more thunderheads billowing in full sail across the sky.

  Lt. Col. Francisco Cerezo Ramirez, of the Treasury Police in the city of San Salvador, shook hands with the army general. He said quietly, “You may depend on me, Victor.”

  “I knew I could.”

  The colonel opened the door of his office and showed the general out. An army lieutenant snapped to attention in the corridor and accompanied his superior officer down the curving marble staircase. The Treasury Police colonel nodded to a bull of a man lounging in the corridor and left the door of his office open behind him. The man’s sun—glasses added nothing to his expressionless face, and his loose shirt flapped beneath his potbelly as he walked. He closed the door after him.

  Broad beams of sunlight shone through the floor-to-ceiling casement windows of the huge office and hit one corner of the enormous rosewood desk. The colonel him—self was quite small, and had a neatly trimmed mustache and a freshly pressed uniform, brightened by medals and decorations.

  “Turco, it seems we have some left-wing gringo spies upsetting our army friends,” the colonel said. “With a movie camera.”

  Turco smirked. This was his kind of work.

  “Male and female, staying here in San Salvador at the Sheraton.” Lieutenant Colonel Cerezo passed some papers to him. “No one lays a finger on them till I say so. First we find out what their affiliation is.”

  “All they need do to get a press pass is rent a car from Avis.” Turco’s vo
ice was flat and rasping.

  “The general thinks this pair has no press credentials.”

  Turco frowned. “Peculiar.”

  “Find out who and what they are, and what they’ve got their hands on so far.”

  “What did the general say they’ve done, sir?”

  The colonel smiled. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by telling you. That’s for you to discover for yourself.”

  Turco’s thick lips slowly curled from his green teeth in a grin.

  Chapter 2

  BENNETT replaced the phone. “He speaks real good English,” he said and sank back into an easy chair in their Sheraton room. “He’s agreed to give me a half-hour interview, so long as we get there punctually at three. After the interview, he’ll take us with him to some kind of meeting.”

  Sally nodded. “Is this Bermudez an old friend of your father’s?”

  “An old patient. Every cardiologist keeps a careful record of his patients and tends to follow up on them more than other doctors do. When my father succeeds in keeping someone with a bad heart alive under unfavorable conditions, he doesn’t mind taking personal credit for it. When the patient happens to be a politician in El Salvador, naturally my father is doubly interested in the stresses involved. According to my father’s instructions, I’m sup—posed to question Bermudez about his blood pressure, pulse rate, medication and diet as well as on political things. Can you believe it?”

  Sally laughed. “Remember that crazy reporter the other night? The one who told us why Salvadorans smoke so heavily—none of them expect to live long enough to develop lung cancer.”

  “In the year or so since Bermudez was last in Boston to see my father, there’s been two or three attempts on his life. You can imagine the mess he must be.”

  They had expected the politician to live in one of the wealthy suburbs where the houses were surrounded by high walls. Instead, their taxi took them to a poor down—town section, one of the few old parts of the city they had seen, where people leaned on windowsills and sat in doorways.

  The taxi driver said, “These people are the best look—outs Senor Bermudez could have. Nobody can come into this neighborhood without being seen. And if they don’t like the look of you …” He turned about to look at them in the backseat while he drove and made a noise with his mouth and snapped his fingers simultaneously.

  “What’s he saying?” Bennett asked.

  “Your friend doesn’t speak Spanish, senora?” the driver asked.

  “No.”

  “You speak it very well. Better than a lot of us do.”

  Sally knew he was referring to her Castilian pronunciation—her European rather than American Spanish. These Central American men seemed amazed by her blond gringa appearance and grammatical, and to them snobbish, Spanish.

  “What kind of man is Senor Bermudez?” she asked.

  The driver steered around a peddler’s cart and shrugged. “A moderate. So what can he do? The leftists have guns. The rightists have guns. The moderates are in the middle and have no guns. Senor Bennudez speaks his mind. You have to give it to him that he has courage.”

  The houses on the next block all had steel mesh over the windows and the doors were fortified by metal plates. In the middle of the block, one old house was set back from the street behind massive iron railings. Sally paid the driver, and they approached the building under the impersonal stares of four men with submachine guns slung from their shoulders. Bennett paused to film them. They did not react.

  “Shit,” Bennett said. “I was hoping one of them would at least wave his gun at me.”

  “Would you dare go around the Combat Zone, back home in Boston, doing what you’re doing here?” Sally asked crossly. “Like hell you would. Yet you run around here like you paid the price of admission and now you want to see the show. I tell you, Bennett, I don’t like the look of these people and they don’t like the look of us.”

  Bennett smiled tolerantly and kissed her cheek. “It’s always a little weird and chaotic doing any movie——especially a documentary. You never know what turn things will take. But that’s what gives the final film its charge—the very same things that drove its makers crazy while they were doing it. I’m kind of glad you weren’t along for the whale movie. If you’d seen’ those big bastards breaching right next to our little rowboat, you’d have headed back to port first day.”

  Sally looked at the ground, hurt that Bennett could be pleased not to have had her with him then. She had already forgotten that he had tried to persuade her not to come to El Salvador and that only her knowledge of Spanish and her role as the film’s producer (that is, financial backer) reversed his judgment that she should not come.

  They had to walk around a wall of sandbags to enter the doorway of the building, which led through a large hall—way to a central courtyard. Here groups of men stood about with rifles and submachine guns. Some had their weapons broken down and were cleaning the trigger assemblies with oily rags and the barrels with twisted pipe cleaners. No one spoke to them.

  “You sure this man is your father’s patient?” Sally asked nervously.

  He laughed. “Of course. I want some footage of these guys. Since you tell me I’m so damn rude or whatever, why don’t you ask their permission?”

  She asked the nearest men. Yes, they would be pleased. Caps and sunglasses were adjusted, bellies sucked in, weapons brandished…

  “And these are the moderates,” Bennett said as he adjusted the lens.

  He was still running the camera when a man about sixty in a white shirt approached, paused in front of the camera with a big smile and then held up a hand in a friendly gesture to signal enough. Bennett switched off the camera.

  “The doctor’s son, eh? How is my old friend in Boston? You are in medicine too, no?”

  “No,” Bennett said.

  “Good. Then you won’t make me listen to advice about what I should not do. I received your father’s letter that you were coming to El Salvador. I wrote by return mail to tell him to stop you.”

  “I’d have come anyway, even if he had tried to stop me.”

  Bermudez frowned for an instant. “If I was a doctor in Boston, no son of mine would set foot in El Salvador.” He looked at Sally. “Your wife?”

  “A friend,” Bennett said.

  “I see.” Bermudez’ voice was cold and he looked away from her. She was dismissed.

  Latin pig, Sally thought.

  “My schedule has changed,” Bermudez said. “Meeting first. Then interview. Come.”

  They followed him through the hallway to the door to the street, along with a dozen of the gun-toting security men. Two vans were now pulled up in front of the building.

  Bermudez gestured apologetically at the gunmen. “I try to be a man of peace as much as possible, but each day it becomes a little more difficult to go the way of nonviolence. Both the communists and the fascists want to kill me. Why? Because I suggested negotiation and peaceful solutions.”

  The Volkswagen van they rode in had metal plates bolted to the inside walls and roof. The window glass had been replaced by inch-thick clear plastic that Sally assumed was bulletproof.

  “I try never to confront them with violence,” Bermudez was saying, “because each time I do so successfully, I become more like them. That means I have to avoid being attacked, without running away. So I bring my armed security men with me everywhere without making a big show of it, as others do. And I change my routine every day. Often even I do not know where I will be in a few hours’ time. That way I stay alive and live to fight another day, no?”

  Sally couldn’t help admiring him a little for the way he handled himself, in spite of the fact that he enraged her through continuing to treat her as if she weren’t there. He’s religious, she decided. He probably saw her as some kind of scarlet woman. And he’d have his hand on her knee as soon as Bennett looked the other way. She knew the type.

  They came to a supermodern high rise, the kind she disli
ked in Boston but which, for some reason, looked great down here. Their van and the one following, bringing the rest of the security men, drove into the under—ground garage beneath the building instead of pulling up before it.

  The armed men tumbled out of the second van and looked about among the parked cars in the garage’s cavernous interior. Then they assumed positions with their guns swinging at the ready, and one nodded to the driver of their van. It was time for them to get out.

  Bennett followed the driver, the two security men next, then Sally, then Bermudez. Bennett panned his camera around the underground garage, complaining of the or light.

  A splatter of what could have been water tore across the concrete wall behind their heads. The automatic gunfire was deafening in the enclosed space. Bermudez’ security men fired back, Sally could not see where. She and Bennett crouched behind a car parked near their van, along with Bermudez. There was a silence after the first bursts of fire. It seemed to goon and on. Bennett was filming. Sally suddenly remembered she had forgotten to mm the mike on and she knew how mad Bennett would be at her about it. She switched it on.

  Some of the security men were running from the cover of one parked car to another. One shouted a warning. They heard a metallic clatter underneath the van. The car they crouched behind sheltered them from the blast, yet it knocked them to the concrete floor. Bermudez fell on top of Sally. He kind of grunted and hung onto her.

  “Filthy animal!” Sally snarled and tried to lift his unresponsive bulk off her body. She finally managed to heave him off her and looked up to see what was happening. The van lay on its side, burning, and clouds of black smoke rolled beneath the low concrete ceiling. There was a long rattling of many guns. Then silence.