by J. B. Hadley
The glistening eyeball dropped out of the red, empty socket and hung on a thick white thread of optic nerve and a half dozen ribbons of muscle. As the man screamed and twisted his head, his eyeball bounced against his cheek. He hardly noticed Harvey wrench the gun from his hand.
Harvey’s cold frenzy was not sated. He touched the automatic to the bridge of the man’s nose and squeezed the trigger. The man fell on his back on the sidewalk, and Harvey stared at the scorched hole he had drilled in the still face with the empty eye socket.
Then he twisted on the other rider, who was on his hands and knees fearfully watching Bob take possession of his submachine gun. Harvey tried to put a bullet in each of his eyes. He hated fear. He only disliked people’s eyes… unless they contained fear. He missed with his first shot—it was at least two inches too high, and the bullet sank through the bone of the forehead. His second shot was fired as the head was jerked back from the impact of the first bullet, with the result that the point of entry was much too low, completely missing the eye and hitting the middle of the cheek.
“Get down fast!” Bob hissed.
They both hit the pavement and wriggled for cover. Bob had seen nothing—he was just responding to the situation as he had been trained.
Lance Hardwick and Joe Nolan had looked behind them when they heard the riderless motorbike scrape against a parked car and fall on its side, engine still kicking and rear wheel spinning. They didn’t hear the sound of the shot that Harvey deflected, but they saw him attack the man and shoot his companion. Next, they saw Bob and Harvey flatten themselves on the pavement and crawl for cover a few milliseconds before a wave of automatic fire ripped over them from the palm trees and bushes on the center strip of the boulevard. Lance and Joe dived for cover themselves.
Bob Murphy gripped the M76 submachine gun by the barrel shroud with his left hand. His right hand set the selector switch on full auto and then retracted the cocking handle along its track into the cocked position. He fired a trial shot into the bushes, but lost three shots because the trigger was heavy and the gun’s cyclic rate too high.
“Harvey, check if he had any spare magazines.”
Harvey moved, crablike, back to the body and drew a hail of fire from the bushes on the center strip. Bob pinpointed the source and delivered a short burst of 9 mm parabellum slugs. The bushes heaved, and a body pitched forward into the roadway and lay still.
One car accelerated past, but the other traffic in each direction had braked to a halt fifty yards or so short of the firing zone. The drivers left their cars and crouched behind them to see what was going on. Those caught in the choked traffic behind blew their horns in mounting frustration at the inexplicable holdup.
Pedestrians had melted away. A few stood in distant doorways, but the recently crowded sidewalks on both sides of the boulevard had emptied except for the combatants.
Harvey found one spare magazine for the M76 submachine gun, and on the second body he found two for his pistol. As soon as Bob saw he had a second magazine with another thirty-six shells, he strafed the bushes in the center strip of the boulevard. He dropped one, gunman; but another, behind the trunk of a palm tree, escaped his fire, delivered a withering burst at him and retreated to the far sidewalk of the boulevard under cover of friendly fire.
Bob changed magazines. He yelled to Harvey, “I see three of them over there.”
Harvey looked disgustedly at the low-caliber pistol in his hand. They heard Lance shout.
Lance went first, then Joe, zigzagging across the road to the center strip. They drew automatic fire from the three guns on the far sidewalk. Lance took an M76 from one of the men Bob had shot. He threw a spare magazine back across the road to Bob, then another. Ice got himself an M16 assault rifle from the other body.
The firelight raged across the boulevard. The mercs had the advantage now, holding the center strip as well as one half of the boulevard, effectively cutting off their three adversaries and pinning them down behind parked cars.
The leftists, realizing they now were in a losing position, tried to move east from car to car in order to make a getaway.
“Let them go!” Bob shouted.
Neither Joe nor Lance heard him as their weapons rattled lead. Lance crippled one man by catching him in an ankle, and then finished him off with a burst to the chest before he could reach the shelter of a car.
“Let them go!” Bob yelled over and over till, finally, in a lull in the firing, they heard him. “Hold your fire! Let them go!”
The two survivors made off eastward along the far side of the boulevard, leaving their dead behind them.
“Follow me,” Bob shouted. “Let’s get the hell outta here! We can’t afford to get arrested any more than they can!”
Joe had to pull Lance by the shoulder, and Harvey too was unwilling to leave, feeling cheated by not having had much of a part in the major firefight, owing to the small caliber of his pistol. The four men kept their weapons and ran from the area cleared by combat to mix in with the crowds of onlookers and stalled traffic. Before they could reach the crowds, armed members of various security forces suddenly swarmed out to meet them—National Police, Treasury Police, National Guard, Customs Police and some other uniforms they did not recognize. Enough automatic weapons were trained on them to chop them into goldfish food.
Bob Murphy threw his M76 to the ground and raised his hands. He looked at the others, but Joe and Lance had already been convinced by this Spanish armada and were dropping their guns. Only Harvey, with his useless short—range .22 automatic pistol, seemed unwilling to put down his gun. He finally let it fall.
“Thank you very much, Harvey,” Bob breathed gratefully. “You just saved all our lives with that one small act of kindness.”
“I ain’t no fuckin’ coward,” Harvey muttered. “If I had a submachine gun, they’d never take me alive.”
A Treasury Police sergeant yelled at them both in Spanish. Lance talked to him, and he did some yelling at Lance.
“I told him you don’t speak the lingo,” Lance explained to the others. “He said we’re not to talk among ourselves. From now on he’ll give me orders and you follow me.”
Bob was about to say something witty, but changed his mind because of the look on the sergeant’s face. They stood there silent and without moving while several members of the different security forces argued with each other. Meanwhile, the bodies lay untended and the traffic was still halted in both directions by police just standing in the roadway, doing nothing. They saw one driver, who kept impatiently honking his horn at them, led away in handcuffs. The members of the different security forces were becoming angrier at one another in their argument.
“They’re fighting over who takes us prisoner,” Lance explained in an undertone. “My bet is on the Treasury Police.”
His bet won. They were escorted at gunpoint to a police van and pushed inside its steel doors. They sat on metal benches facing each other and waited, along with their guards.
One of the policemen pointed at two men being led to the van at gunpoint. “Your enemies,” he told Lance.
The two men and more policemen climbed into the back of the van, and the doors were slammed behind them. The police all seemed to know the two prisoners they had brought in last and jeered at them in a seemingly friendly way, calling one by the name of “Ricardo.” The two prisoners remained silent and sullen. No one said anything to the four mercs. After the van had traveled for about ten minutes, it slowed to a stop. The policemen opened the rear doors and pushed the two Salvadoran prisoners outside. The two men stayed where they were, one sitting in the roadway and the other standing next to the van doors and trying to get back in. One policeman booted him in the chest as the van moved forward.
Two of the cops in the van poked their M16s through the open rear doors and mowed down the two men from a distance of about ten yards. The van continued moving and the police shut the rear doors. The cop next to Lance said something.
Lan
ce translated it for the others. “They were trying to escape.”
Chapter 10
JOE Nolan sat on a wooden kitchen chair in an otherwise empty room, eight by ten, brown-yellow walls, tiled floor, light fixture behind a cage in a very high ceiling, no window, steel door, a peephole two-thirds of the way up the door. Silence.
He had stuck to his story. He was an American tourist. He knew the other three: they stayed at the same hotel. He had broken no law, only defended himself in a vicious attack. As an American citizen, he expected a quick release. No, he had no complaints to make about his treatment by the Treasury Police.
Joe had sat in a cell often enough before to know how to keep still and wait for events to take their course. He sure as hell was not looking for a way to attempt an escape.
As always when engaging the enemy, Comandante Clarinero had set up the six companies of his brigade as watertight units—two assault companies, one reinforcement, one communications, one watchdog and one supply. Normally the two assault companies carried out the mission, with the reinforcement company as a backup. The watch-dog company sealed off access roads, set up antiaircraft defense, created diversionary tactics or whatever the circumstances demanded. Watchdog was often aided in this by the communications company, who also kept lines of supply and retreat open and generally did everything it was no one else’s job to do. The supply company’s responsibility was ammunition, weapons, drinking water, food and equipment. In a regular army the assault companies would be the elite group and attract the best fighting men, but this was not so in Clarinero’s brigade, because with an army of irregulars fighting a guerrilla war, the focus of combat rarely occurred where it was planned. Any of the companies could find itself spearheading the attack or bearing the chief brunt of an assault. In fact, the supply company was regarded as being the most dangerous to be a member of, since it was less mobile than the others.
Paulo Esteban and two other Cuban advisors were with the communications company. They watched the air shimmer over the broad Lempa river in the heat of early afternoon. The twenty-eight Salvadorans in the company set about their tasks, keeping to the cover of the under—growth at the river’s edge. At this point the Lempa ran roughly north-to-south, from the border with Honduras into the Pacific, dividing off the eastern third of El Salvador from the rest of the country. Guerrilla strategy was to blow the bridges and keep them down, crippling the movements of government troops and sealing off the eastern provinces.
About a half mile downstream, army engineers worked on a barge and, aloft, in the twisted steel framework of the bridge’s central span that the rebels had destroyed three months previously. Armored personnel carriers and dug-in gun and mortar emplacements guarded the approaches to the bridge on both banks.
The three Cubans trained their binoculars on the workers and soldiers at the bridge, and when they tired of that, they lowered their binoculars and watched the river water flow past and the Salvadoran guerrillas prepare their gear. Comandante Clarinero stubbornly refused to allow them to take an active role or issue instructions during an operation. Their function was to observe and to offer constructive criticism and advice after the event. Both Cubans and Salvadorans recognized he limited Cuban power with this tactic, and the Salvadoran members of the brigade greatly enjoyed observing this order strictly. The Cubans’ only revenge was to sit back and watch them going about something the wrong way and say nothing with superior smiles on their faces.
It can take only one inexperienced man to foul up an operation. The guerrillas usually had no shortage of inexperienced men, so they were used to things going wrong and rarely bet everything on any single thing happening. It wasn’t the best system, but it worked.
The company’s lieutenant went over things one last time. “We drop the first barrel in the water in”—he consulted his watch—”ninety-three seconds’ time; the second barrel goes in when the first is about halfway to the bridge—I will give the signal; and the third barrel goes in immediately after the first barrel blows.”
The Cubans smiled among themselves, especially about the ninety—three seconds. It didn’t matter a damn about the exact time the barrel went into the water, since the river currents would control the time of its arrival at the bridge and they had no idea how fast the currents were. Anyway, Clarinero and the assault companies would wait till they heard the sound of the first blast before doing anything.
Two of the guerrillas dragged a barrel to the riverbank and, behind the cover of a tree, dropped it into the water. The barrel was an aluminum beer keg packed with TNT with a radio-activated detonator. Days ago, each barrel had been weighted and tested to float upright about four feet below the surface. The ten-foot whiplash antenna on each barrel was concealed in leafy tree branches.
The Cubans watched the barrel float away and followed the six feet of leafy branches that protruded above the water and that marked the keg’s position as it was taken by currents into midstream.
“Keep an eye on that barrel,” Paulo Esteban told the others. “Once you lose sight of it, it will be hard to pick up again at a distance.”
“Let’s not depend on our Salvadoran friends to keep track of it then,” Manuel said.
“It looks very natural,” Paulo said. “Just like a branch sticking up from a submerged log.”
“Do you think they’ll have nets protecting them?”
“Clarinero’s men said not, for what that’s worth.”
The third Cuban said, “Manuel tells me that Clarinero knows nothing of the television crew.”
“No, I thought it better not to tell him in case he would try to protect Miss America from them,” Paulo said. “I organized an escort for the crew while I was in the city—it’s a BBC camera crew here on special assignment from London. If we give them something worth watching, all the U.S. networks will use it too. Clarinero thinks this raid is being made to boost his image. He’d be very offended if he knew its real purpose is to show off the girl.”
“The man’s a fool,” the third Cuban said. “Why do we tolerate him?”
Esteban smiled. “Because fools have their uses when you keep them in their place. Clarinero’s use is to steer the people’s nationalism toward our cause, and his place is out there dodging bullets with a reckless laugh.”
Manuel snickered. “And the girl?”
“She’s in love with him, you’ve seen that.” Paulo snapped his fingers. “She’ll do whatever he says. And he’ll do what we tell him to.”
“Why is the girl’s presence being made public now?” Manuel asked.
“We can’t trust the Salvadorans. If her father asks politely for her, they’d be quite likely to insist on sending her back. We have to polarize all concerned on her presence here if it’s ever going to benefit us.”
“Use an American against America?” Manuel queried.
Paulo slapped him on the shoulder. “Now you got it.”
They watched the lieutenant and his men drop the second barrel into the river. It too floated concealed beneath the muddy water, with only its radio aerial sticking above the surface, camouflaged with leaves and branches. The men readied the third barrel, to be dumped in the water after the first one exploded.
The three Cubans moved higher on the bank to follow the course of the first barrel. It had to be detonated at just the right moment—too late, and the river currents would have carried it beneath and beyond the repair work on the bridge and it would be wasted. Distances were hard to judge across water.
“We’ll wait till we see the aerial branches just about touching the barge,” the lieutenant shouted up to them. The guerrilla sighted through his binoculars once again and then beckoned to one of his men to fetch the small radio transmitter that would send the signal to detonate the charge inside the barrel. The man stood next to the lieutenant, the whiplash antenna of the transmitter quivering above their heads.
Paulo Esteban followed the pitching leafy marker far downstream. It was almost at the black barge upon w
hich a huge crane was lifting ironwork for the bridge. The barge was moored in midstream, and it seemed that the current of the main channel would bring the barrel very close to the barge, as they had hoped. Men ran about the deck of the barge as the crane raised its load of steel T-beams to the damaged span overhead. Tiny figures climbed about in the bridge’s framework high above the water. Through Esteban’s binoculars, the green leaves concealing the aerial seemed to be almost touching the upstream end of the barge.
Paulo had to check himself from calling out a command to Clarinero’s lieutenant, knowing that the Salvadoran would ignore it as a matter of principle, even if it meant missing the opportunity of blowing the bridge. The Cuban muttered under his breath and stared hard through his binoculars.
“Fire!” the lieutenant yelled to the man with the radio transmitter.
The man pressed the key to send the radio signal that would detonate the charge inside the barrel.
A few yards from him, the third barrel, not yet placed in the water, suddenly expanded into thousands of hot metal fragments in a scorching blast of yellowish orange light. The lieutenant and his men were lifted off the ground by the blast. Their flesh was torn from their bones, and their bodies thumped lifelessly back to earth, ripped, gouged, battered.
Paulo Esteban picked himself out of the dirt. He was bleeding from a cut on his neck, and another on his left arm. He could see that the two other Cubans had survived the explosion also, protected from the main force of the blast, as he had been, by an earth bank.
“They used the wrong radio to send the signal,” Paulo shouted at the two Cubans, who crouched motionless with shock. “Help me find the right one before it’s too late.”
Esteban ran among the mutilated bodies of the Salvadorans, searching for the transmitter. He ignored everything except what he was looking for. He snatched up a shattered plastic box with a snapped aerial. He looked downriver toward the bridge and pressed the key.
