by J. B. Hadley
“You have a million to spare?” Mike asked him casually.
Dwight blinked. “I don’t toss my money around any old how, Mr. Campbell. Although it’s not a widely known fact, holding onto one’s money once one has got it can be just as difficult as earning it in the first place.”
Mike patiently rephrased his question. “Are you willing to spend a million to get your daughter back?”
Dwight thought about that. “Yes.”
“I pay the team members a share of one hundred thou each, win or lose,” Mike explained. “I take two shares. The rest goes on expenses. Might run you more than a million.”
Dwight nodded his agreement.
“Bob doesn’t need his hundred thousand,” Eunice put in brightly. “He’ll do it for friendship’s sake, won’t you, Bob?”
“No, he won’t, Eunice,” Mike said firmly. “I make the rules, and those rules say Bob gets his share and holds onto it. No givebacks. Clear?”
“Absolutely.” Dwight said.
Bob said with an evil smile, “Hell, the whole lot of us ain’t costing Dwight what a medium-good pitcher would demand for a season on his baseball team.”
“Yes, but that’s an investment,” Dwight replied. “I’d earn it all back and more in ticket sales.”
“You trying to say your daughter Sally isn’t a good investment?” Bob needled.
“That’s a low blow, Bob. But I suppose I do look upon my children as emotional investments, and I could say that Sally has not been a good emotional investment.”
“You put your money in and expect affection back?” Bob continued to goad him.
“Bob, please stop,” Eunice pleaded.
“Eunice, thank you, but I’m capable of taking care of myself,” Dwight put in. “Whatever inadequacies I may or may not have as a father hardly concern you gentlemen as a paramilitary group.”
Mike handed him a piece of paper. “That’s the account number and bank, in Georgetown on Grand Cayman, where you deposit the money. We’ll need recent photos of your daughter, a signed statement from you authorizing us to rescue her and anything else at all that you think might help us. The most important thing you can do is maintain secrecy about having contacted us.”
“You mean to say you’ll definitely go?” Dwight asked, delighted.
“Bob and I will go, but that’s the only guarantee I can offer. The odds will be against us.”
Andre was aware he had not been included. He sipped his coffee reflectively. As if his mind were still on the food, he said, “Bob, by any chance was that awful sauce on the lamb one of your Australian specialties?”
After almost a week at the guerrilla camp, Gabriela woke Sally Poynings one morning before dawn.
“We have to move out at first light,” Gabriela said. “Get yourself ready.”
“But where are we going?” Sally asked, rubbing her eyes.
“I don’t know. Somewhere more secure.”
“I’m not sure I want to go,” Sally announced.
Sally had said nothing yet to Gabriela of her feelings that things were not working out as she had hoped. After a11, she had come to find the truth, to find answers. She had now decided there were no answers to be found living in a tent on the pine-covered slope of a mountain. The sound of car horns on the Boulevard de los Heroes would be sweet music in her ears at this moment.
“I think I’ll stay on here another day or so,” Sally said, “then take a trip into San Salvador and see how that feels.”
Gabriela looked at her for a moment and then went away without a word.
Sally was returning to the tent after having washed her face when Gabriela came back with Antonio.
“Senorita Sarah Quincy Poynings,” he said in the very formal tones he used when irritated—calling her by her correct name Sarah, which she hated, “when you are in a military camp you obey orders, unless you are in a position to give them.”
“I feel like a couple of days in the city, Antonio,” Sally said. “Have some hot tamales from a street stall. Spend fifteen minutes in a hotel shower. Then I’d like to try the coastline you guys hold in the province of La Union or Usulutan. I mean, why be a rebel in the mountains when you can be one on the beach?”
Antonio gave her that sarcastic smile she remembered from the time he had made her leave some of her favorite clothes behind in that suitcase in the valley. He asked, “Should I phone ahead to make reservations for you and make sure they take American Express?”
“Don’t be mean, Antonio,” Sally said. “What’s the problem?”
“We have io problem, senorita. We have orders. You move out this morning.”
“Are you coming too?”
“No.” Antonio’s coldness melted. “I would like to, Sally, but I can’t.”
“And Gabriela?”
“If you want her to go with you, she will go.”
“Yes,” Sally said without hesitation. “All right, Gabriela?”
“I’d like to, Sally.”
Sally noticed the momentary glance exchanged between them. If Sally wasn’t exactly their prisoner, certainly Gabriela was some kind of guard over her. But Sally was used to that, and she felt safe with Gabriela around and liked her as a person.
“Better get your coffee and have something to eat, Sally,” Antonio said. “You leave in thirty minutes.”
As she watched him walk away, Sally regretted not having had a chance to talk with him more over the past days. He was always so busy, and she knew that he had deliberately kept away from her so as not to become distracted from his rebel activities.
She, Gabriela and two men force-marched through the mountain forests nearly all day till they reached another camp. They left that at dawn the following day, with eight new recruits. At the end of three days’ constant trekking through the mountains, they had collected twenty-seven recruits along the way and were told that next day they would reach the camp of the legendary Comandante Clarinero.
Sally was excited. Here at last was the real thing! The big time! Comandante Clarinero was the Robin Hood of the guerrillas. He swooped down on government forces, captured them and sent them home gunless to their mothers or wives and children with a stem warning to find a better line of work in the future. He announced raises for workers on the coffee fincas; and the big landowners had no choice but to pay them, even when they had government troops on their land. Comandante Clarinero talked to the New York Times and CBS News and so forth on a regular basis. He was banned from her father’s chain of TV stations. Now Sally would get to meet him in person! Things were definitely looking up.
They reached the camp about noon, and everyone but Sally spent the next three hottest hours of the day resting in the shade of the forest pines. She pestered many of the comandante’s guerrillas with conversation and explored the camp. People began to move about again when the heat abated a little. She heard Gabriela calling her name.
“The comandante wants to talk with you,” Gabriela said.
Sally already knew that the biggest tent in the camp was the comandante’s office, but that he slept in a small tent too, like everyone else. She had steered clear of his office till now, when she followed Gabriela toward it.
Four men sat behind a folding table under a canopy near the large tent, like judges at a bench. One had thick folders stacked before him on the table, and although he clearly modeled his appearance on that of Pancho Villa, he looked more like a harassed schoolteacher who has just realized he is now going to have to read all these homework projects. He was handsome and young, and Sally’s heart skipped a beat as he was introduced to her as Comandante Clarinero. Only one of the other three men made an impression on her. He was a brutal, powerful man with piercing eyes with a large cigar in his mouth and a big revolver on the table in front of him. His name was Paulo Esteban, and she could tell by his accent he was not Salvadoran. Gabriela told her later that this Cuban had been picked personally by Fidel Castro as his advisor to the comandante.
Sally t
old her story in great detail. They seemed less interested in her than in Bennett’s films and how he knew Bermudez. To her surprise, they never questioned her motivations. Was she of such little importance it didn’t matter why she had come? Her annoyance at this was overcome by her awareness that she still could not have given them a clear answer if they had asked. But they didn’t.
“Is that all?” she said to Gabriela as the two women left.
“I suppose so.”
“But don’t they need to know about my political stance and life-style and—”
“No,” Gabriela said shortly. “All they need to know is which side you’re on. We’re all here for our own reasons. After we win and take power, maybe then we’ll see what differences lie among us.”
“That’s when the communists will squeeze out the moderates and socialists in order to grab power for the party,” Sally observed acidly.
Gabriela smiled. “It often seems to turn out that way.” Sally welcomed the quick descent of night because she was exhausted after her three-day trek and had taken no rest during the hot part of the day. She and Gabriel had been assigned a tent, and she was just about to creep into it when she heard the notes of a trumpet playing a strange and mournful tune. She sat outside the tent awhile and listened to old-fashioned dance measures and marches with all sorts of decorative trills that might have sounded very ordinary played by a full brass band but which had an eerie quality played on a solitary horn at dusk in a mountain forest.
Sally walked toward the sound. She saw the handsome young comandante sitting alone on a rock playing a battered silver cornet. The cornet’s notes were softer, more buttery, than the sharp, sweet notes of a trumpet. She sat at a distance, watching and listening to the melancholy old airs until it was completely dark. At the end of one tune, the comandante got to his feet without warning and walked back toward the tents.
Sally almost called after him, aware that he had not seen her there listening to him. But she did not. She made her way slowly back to her tent in the darkness, her head full of sensual brass glissandos and diminuendos, knowing she would dream about the comandante.
Early the next morning, the comandante led his men from the camp on a series of raids. Apart from Sally and Gabriela, only thirteen were left behind in the camp, and these were some of the recruits who had arrived with them. Gabriela was placed in charge.
A few hours after the others had departed, Sally heard shouting as she walked with Gabriela among the tents beneath the pines. This camp was much more extensive than the others she had seen, but the cover offered by the pines here was not so good as at the first camp in which she had stayed. The trees were bigger here but more thinly spread on the ground. The men shouting were pointing up at the sky, a calm and peaceful blue in gaps in the branches overhead.
“Push-pull! Push-pull!”
“Stay still!” Gabriela yelled at the men who were running about and shouting.
The big automatic pistol appeared in her left hand and she fired two shots over their heads. That stopped them.
“Don’t move from where you are!” Gabriela ordered. “Next man who moves, I shoot him!”
No one moved.
Gabriela muttered to Sally beside her, “Damn raw recruits. Where do they come from? They should know better.”
Sally didn’t have time to dwell on Gabriela’s sudden transformation, as the Salvadoran woman’s voice was drowned out by the roar of an aircraft flying low overhead.
Gabriela shouted to Sally above the noise, “See the propellers both fore and aft on the engine mounts? That’s why we call the plane a push-pull. It’s an 0-2, an observation craft you Americans give to the Salvadoran air force. They often work with A-37s.”
Sally did not ask what an A-37 was. The recruits had stopped panicking and were looking a bit shamefaced. Gabriela put away her big pistol.
“They must have seen something,” she announced in a loud voice. She pointed. “Shout to those men over there to keep still. That plane will make a repeat pass.”
Sally looked around. Earth had been thrown on the fire the previous night—no smoke rose from it. The tents were green, and everything else was either green also or camouflaged. She had already been told that any brightly colored object that stood out from its background—even an object as small as the notebook with a bright red cover that one recruit was carrying at the time—could be seen quite easily from the air, particularly if it was moving. Sally ran an anxious eye over everything, ironically aware of how she was slipping into the role of a guerrilla and learning survival tactics.
They heard the plane’s engines again, coming from the same direction it had approached before.
“He’s circled around and he’s coming in this time higher than he was before,” Gabriela told them. “You can bet he’s spotted something if he’s afraid to come in low.”
The plane did not continue its flight path, but cut to the left and began to climb in a tight circle directly above them.
“Bastard has seen us!” Gabriela yelled. “He’s calling in the A-37s and marking our position for them!”
She ran to a nearby supply tent and came out carrying a four-foot metal tube with a scope mounted on it. In her left hand she carried an energy pack and trailing wires. She hooked up the tube to the energy pack, placed it on her right shoulder and sighted up at the plane through the scope. And waited.
“Damn,” Gabriela muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Sally ventured.
“I’m waiting for the sound signal that tells when the missile homing system is engaged. This is a Redeye, one of your American surface-to-air missiles. Its infrared homing device zeroes in on the heat given off by the aircraft’s engines. I hope the energy system has been maintained.”
Gabriela waited for the sound signal, balancing the tube on her shoulder and sighting the 0-2 plane through the scope as it circled higher and higher overhead. Sally backed away from her slowly, holding her fingers in her ears.
There was no explosion—only a whistle as the four-foot missile was launched from its carrying tube. Twenty feet above the ground, the missile’s main motor took over from its booster and the projectile shot toward its target at supersonic speed.
The two women and the recruits watched the missile streak up to the plane, now very high above them. Five seconds passed, and the streaking dart of high explosives was almost upon its prey when the aircraft dipped its right wing and tumbled out of its flight path.
The missile quivered in midflight, but its force drove it on past the plane. The projectile rose a little higher, slowed and then dropped like a spent arrow.
“He saw it coming,” Gabriela said through her teeth. “We have another, but he’s near three thousand meters—almost out of range—as it is.” She pointed to one of the recruits. “You, take this norteamericana away from here. Keep her out in the open, away from the trees.”
Before Sally could protest, the recruit grabbed her by the left wrist and dragged her after him to the edge of the pine forest. She heard the distant explosion of the Redeye missile hitting the ground and felt the heat of the sun beat down on her as they left the shade of the trees. She followed the recruit down a slope, half-running and half-falling after him, dragged by one arm. He stopped, pushed her down behind a large rock and lay on the ground beside her, looking fearfully up at the sky. The push-pull observation plane continued to circle high above the location of the camp.
A green drab military jet screamed low over their heads, and its racing shadow on the ground passed over them.
A huge billow of flame—blue and white at its core, radiating out to boiling orange with black smoke fringes—lifted giant pines by their roots high into the at. Second and third blasts followed the first in quick succession.
The jet disappeared, but the 0-2 came in on a wide circle to inspect the damage. The entire part of the forest where the camp had been was now a roaring fire that was spreading with the wind up the mountain slope. Apparently satisfied wi
th the results, the push-pull plane completed only one pass and flew away.
Sally and the recruit, whose name was Miguel, waited until the fire burned itself out. They ran among the charred trunks, across thick smoldering beds of dead pine needles, to where the tents had been. Trees were still burning around the first bomb crater, and were it not for the cooling breeze from behind their backs, they could not have stood the heat all about them.
They kept moving, running from one less scorched place to another, smeared now with ash and carbon, sweat seeping from every pore of their bodies. There were big flames in the trees higher up the slope as the fire moved uphill away from them, with loud crackling sounds of its burning and choking smoke floating everywhere. They could not find where the tents had been.
“Look!” Miguel pointed.
The bodies lay about the blackened forest floor with only fragments of burnt cloth adhering to their scorched flesh. The smell of cooked meat revolted Sally as much as the sight of the charred corpses, but she forced herself to walk among them with Miguel. She knew that none could possibly be alive, but felt she owed it to Gabriela to look for her, on the remote chance, somehow, something… She did not know what, and went on looking.
Sally found the empty Redeye missile tube that Gabriela had fired. Another tube, this one loaded, lay next to a body charred beyond recognition—burned even beyond her being able to tell whether it was male or female. The guerrilla fighters wore no dog tags. Sally could not bring herself to move the flame-shriveled human remains with her foot in order to examine the corpse more closely. She felt cold and empty—too much in shock to grieve for her friend Gabriela—and began walking toward the edge of the burned-over area so she could feel grass under her feet again, get away from the heat and the smell of burning. Miguel followed.
