by J. B. Hadley
“I’ll stay with Mike,” Bob told Andre.
“I agree,” Andre said, for once with a note of friendliness for Bob in his voice.
“I got no time to argue,” Mike snapped. “Rest of you, move out. Now! Move it!”
He had no need to keep his voice lowered anymore, because of the pandemonium in the camp below them. Sparks from the burning bunkhouse had set fire to the roof of the next bunkhouse. The firefighters had abandoned the first building to the flames and sought now to save the second.
Mike and Bob descended the slope and made their way through the deserted part of the camp to approach the firefighters from behind.
Mike whispered to Bob, “’Preciate you coming along. My guess is that Cesar has already made the approach we are taking. He’ll watch and wait till he gets a crack at Esteban—none of the other Cubans will distract him from that. He’ll shoot, and then run for it.”
“Jeopardizing our whole getaway,” Bob whispered back. “Why not leave him behind and go on with the others?”
Mike did not answer right off, looking in the pools—of light and the shadows. “Cesar has done a lot for all of us up till this happened. I’m not sure we’d have made it this far without him. It was my mistake. I should have foreseen that the chance to nail Esteban would prove too tempting for him at close quarters. He would have been okay if I’d left him back with Andre and took someone else with me to get the girl.”
“So you blame yourself?”
Mike shrugged. “What’s goes wrong is always the leader’s fault.”
Paulo Esteban had Manuel put men on the bunkhouse roofs to extinguish sparks and sent others to quench grass fires. When Esteban ascertained that everything was fully under control, he turned to leave, and for an instant, by the light of an oil lamp by the corner of one bunkhouse, he saw a face he recognized.
It was not the face of someone he was acquainted with. It was a face he had seen before somewhere. After a moment’s thought, he had it.
“Manuel!” he called urgently, hauling out his revolver. “I’ve just seen someone up this way. I’d swear I know him from that pamphlet of photos of Miami Cubans active against us. The fire”—it suddenly occurred to him—”it’s a diversion! Quick! Back to the girl!”
As they ran, Paulo came across three Salvadorans with Kalashnikovs and he ordered them along, too.
Cesar Ordonez stalked them. He knew he had been seen by Esteban and spotted as a stranger. Esteban had been too far off for Cesar to kill him at that time. Then Esteban had thought to check on the girl—Cesar knew where he was going and why. Cesar had to get Esteban now, or Mike and the others might not get away. Cesar cared nothing for his own safety. If he could kill an international communist provocateur of Esteban’s status, his own life would be worth sacrificing. Mike Campbell had his priorities, and Cesar knew he might be fouling up things for him; but the importance of Cesar’s own priorities outweighed those of Mike, which were only to rescue a spoiled rich bitch who, had she been poor and from an unknown family, would readily have been abandoned to pay for her mistakes. Cesar said to himself that he would never have broken off from Mike’s mission and endangered it for the sake of an ordinary Cuban communist. But Paulo Esteban was too big a fish to let slip through his nets. No matter what the consequences, Cesar had to kill him. He was duty-bound. For a proud and free Cuba once again.
Esteban and his fellow Cuban now had three men with Kalashnikovs along with them, but that was not going to save Esteban. Cesar was dedicated to kill only one man here; the rest were immaterial. He personally was going to rid the world of Paulo Esteban.
Cesar ran from shadow to shadow, staying out of the circles of feeble light given off by the oil lamps. Esteban was easy to tell from the others, since he was a foot taller and twice as broad across the shoulders. Cesar knew he was headed for the small wooden hut where Mike and he had found the girl. Cesar ran at full speed and got to a place where he thought he would have a clear shot at Esteban as he passed through an area lit by three lamps. He checked that the selector switch of his Uzi was on full automatic. He could hear them coming.
The other Cuban was first through the lighted area. Cesar held his fire. He would get that one later. Then the three with Kalashnikovs. But not Paulo Esteban.
Cesar heard a sound immediately behind him.
“Don’t turn around,” an amused Cuban voice said in his ear.
Cesar felt the barrel of a gun pressed into the back of his neck.
“Keep still,” the Cuban told him.
Cesar clutched his Uzi, finger on its trigger, wondering if he whirled about would he get off a burst of fire and catch Esteban with a fatal bullet, in spite of the almost certain bullet in his own neck. It would be worth it.
“She’s gone! Gone!” Manuel was shouting at the small wood hut.
“I thought so,” Esteban said calmly in Cesar’s ear. “But taking her wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to come after me also. You know who I am. Paulo Esteban. I know your face.”
“Cesar Ordonez.”
“Of course. Forgive me, I should have remembered. There are people in Havana who would give their eyeteeth to spend a few hours with you, alive and talkative, Cesar. You would be a big prize for me to deliver in ordinary times. But unfortunately, losing Sally Poynings would hurt my reputation more than capturing you would build it. So I am forced to offer a deal. You for her.”
The gun barrel pressed harder into the back of Cesar’s neck.
“Do you expect me to believe you would keep your side of a bargain?” Cesar asked, trying to distract him. The gun barrel eased for a moment.
Cesar spun around, finger already pressing on the Uzi’s bigger. The submachine gun spat bullets. Esteban fired, shattering Cesar’s spinal column with a .45 slug.
The instant the bullet sheared through Cesar’s spinal cord, his trigger finger relaxed.
Esteban was faced for a moment by the staggering man, already dead and the Uzi in his hands, the Uzi that had coughed its last slug only inches from his arm and which was now pointing directly at his chest—but silent. Cesar toppled in a heap over the Uzi, still in his lifeless hands.
Campbell and Murphy heard the distinctive rattle of the Uzi’s fire. They ran to where the sound came from and found Cesar’s body.
Mike covered the dead merc’s face with the bush hat lying next to him. Cesar’s Uzi was gone.
“Let’s get that bastard Esteban,” Mike ground out savagely.
“We should go, Mike,” Bob cautioned. “We should catch up to the others.”
Mike saw the wisdom of this advice, but he found it impossible to control his rage and his desire to avenge his dead friend. Mike had now forgotten how Cesar had endangered everyone on the mission by taking off on his own. To Mike, Cesar was one of his men lost. Who deserved to be avenged.
“Mike, we got to move out fast,” Bob pleaded. “All hell is breaking loose around here.”
Campbell’s mind snapped to attention. He felt he must have slipped into some kind of reverie. The alarm had been raised. The camp’s occupants were rushing for their weapons. There was no question now of trying to hunt down Esteban.
Mike held the dead man’s hands in his own for a moment and then placed them folded on his chest. “Good-bye, old friend.”
He and Bob ran from shadow to shadow, heading for the spot where Andre and the others had set out from.
“There they go!” a voice shouted.
“Two of them!” another called.
Mike stopped in his tracks. “We’ll have to head another way,” he said to Bob. “We can’t put them on Andre’s trail.”
But as they cut across to the opposite side of the compound, they were seen again, this time before they had gotten close to the perimeter. Bullets whistled over their heads and zinged off the sides of wood huts. Not far ahead of them, three men ran into an area of lamplight and were cut down in error by friendly fire.
When the Salvadorans and Cubans saw their mistake, they became mor
e disorganized than ever. Groups of them ran this way and that, shouting and sometimes shooting at one another. In the confusion, Mike and Bob made it nearly all the way to the perimeter before they ran into serious fire.
Six or seven armed men were directly between them and the forest at the edge of the camp. Perhaps fifty, sixty or even more were chasing them from behind.
“We’re goin’ through!” Mike yelled at Bob. “Fast!”
They came out of the darkness at the guerrillas in front of them, both men using their Uzis. The Uzi was perfect for night-fighting, since all a man had to do to change the magazine was find one hand with the other. The magazine slipped up inside the gun’s pistol grip, so precious seconds were not lost in fumbling in the dark, seconds that could cost a man his life.
The two advanced, their Uzis stuttering flaming messages of death. They overran the first guerrilla in their path. Their second victim’s Kalashnikov jammed; and while Mike sprayed him with 9 mm pesticide, Bob re—moved the left half of a third guerrilla’s skull with a concentrated burst of fire.
Campbell and Murphy were too busy exterminating to notice the bullets zipping past them from behind. Then one terrorist in front of them caught them by surprise. They hadn’t seen him hide, and he popped up a few yards before them in an area of lamplight, about to spray the pair of them with his submachine gun (Mike remembered thinking it was a Sterling because the magazine feed was at a right angle on one side) when a bullet from behind, meant for Campbell’s back, caught the terrorist with the Sterling between the eyes and dropped him at their feet.
After that, nothing could stop them. Bob literally over—ran one of their adversaries, perhaps never even striking him with a bullet, only walking him into the dirt with his combat boots, giving him a farewell step in the face that would certainly involve him in major dental work if he survived. Mike just rousted them as he would bobwhites out of long grass, and bagged three of them on a single magazine.
They slowed when they reached the cover of the forest, and Mike led Bob in a tight half-circle around the clearing to Andre’s departure point, almost exactly in the opposite direction than they had been last seen running.
The Salvadorans and Cubans were sending heavy fire and now mortar shells deep into the forest at the point they had seen the two enter it. The dry undergrowth and trees had started to blaze.
Bob said to Mike, “The assholes have started a forest fire. Maybe they’ll burn their whole fucking camp down.”
Mike was consulting the luminous dial of his compass to get a heading of north-northeast. He said, “It couldn’t happen to nicer people.”
Andre kept Sally close by him, with Nolan and Waller in front and Hardwick in the rear. They were making good progress through the forest, considering it was night. Andre was pleased and surprised that Sally could rough it well enough—he had expected her to be a drag on them by being physically unable for hardship and by being mentally unsuited to anything but her own impulses. He had expected a pampered, spoiled brat. Instead, he found her to be a silent and determined survivor who realized she was clutching at some last straws.
As a woman, she was a mystery to Andre. He thought that he had reached the age where he was quite willing to leave many of these young women to men younger than he. The woman he understood still liked a man to hold a door open for her, light her cigarette, inhale her perfume. … Girls like Sally didn’t smoke, didn’t wear perfume and were likely to hold the door open for him and insist on paying a restaurant bill. Definitely not his style.
After twenty minutes of rough climbing, they heard shooting back at the camp. Everyone stopped. They could see clearly across the dark valley to where flames were still consuming the bunkhouse.
Andre said, “Mike’s orders are to keep moving.”
As they trudged onward, the firing back at the camp continued, ending with explosions of mortar shells and new fires in the forest near the edge of the clearing.
“Keep moving,” Andre ordered. “Mike will catch up.”
They marched hard up the side of the valley for more than an hour and reached its rim before Andre called for a five-minute rest. The lighted clearing on the far side of the valley was being engulfed all along one side by a huge forest fire, and many of the wood buildings were also aflame.
“I hope the bastards fry,” were the first words any of them heard Sally speak.
They all laughed at the ferocity in the pretty girl’s voice, and she laughed too. The ice between them was broken.
“Thanks for coming to get me,” she told them as they set out again. North-northeast. The Honduran border was about fifteen kilometers away.
They kept moving through the night, stopping for five or ten minutes’ rest every hour. They usually ate something, to help them keep warm, every time they stopped. The chill mountain night air made them glad to move on again after each rest, if only to warm themselves. Andre checked his compass frequently, but did not fool himself that he was traveling in anything like a straight line. The most he could hope for was to stay in one general direction. Both he and Mike had known from the start the low probability of Mike’s ever catching up and joining them, even if all went well. But they could realistically hope that they would both cross the Honduran border not far from each other and at more or less the same time—all going well.
Andre understood Mike’s directive to him. His responsibility now was to deliver the girl, come what may. To Andre, this was a triumph. He had been the one Mike was most reluctant to take along on the mission, yet when it came to handing over the leadership, Mike had passed it to him. Without any palaver. It was just “Here, Andre, take over.” It sure as hell made one thing clear to everybody—Andre Verdoux was not yet over the hill!
“Fucker thinks he’s Charles de Gaulle,” Joe Nolan complained to Harvey Waller so that Andre could overhear.
Harvey laughed. They both liked Verdoux. Harvey said, “Naw, Andre’s nose is too big.”
Andre’s Gallic pride shrugged off all such sniveling complaints from the lower orders. Cortez, in his time and perhaps over this same ground, forged onward with no greater resolution than Andre Verdoux.
Because of the uphill-and-downhill going, changes of routes, rests, easy stretches alternating endlessly with hard going, no one had any idea of how far they had traveled as dawn broke.
“We might already be in Honduras,” Lance suggested.
That was possible, but no one believed it was going to be that easy.
“We can’t be far off,” Andre said, “but I’m not able to recognize anything from yesterday.”
“We’ve come a different way,” Joe agreed.
None of them mentioned what their muscles and bones and all the fibers in their bodies were screaming—lie down and sleep! At this time, twenty-four hours previously, they had been watching the mountain pass for the five Cubans after a night on the freezing slope. And from there they had hit the whiskey and whores in San Salvador for a few hours, then by chopper to the contras on this border—and it had been nonstop after that. Was the end yet in sight?
As daylight spread, they heard choppers.
“They’re coming from the south,” Harvey said. “From inside Nicaragua.”
“Putting down men between us and the border,” Joe added.
“They can’t have seen us,” Andre said.
“They must have,” Lance put in.
Sally said nothing.
“Somebody must have sighted us not far back and called them in,” Andre decided. “They’ve come down right in our path. Joe, scout around and tell us what you see.”
A lot of men have enough courage to make good scouts, but not many have enough mother wit to know when to withdraw. Joe Nolan had both.
Joe was not gone long. “Shit, they seen us all right! And they’re coming right this way! Those four choppers put in at least fifty men, and it looks to me like there’s many more behind them. My guess is we got a solid wall of Nicaraguan regulars between us and the border
. But meantime, we got those fifty jokers coming this way!”
Andre had to decide. There was no point in going back the way they had come, since they had already been spotted coming this way and would be seen again or attacked this time. They couldn’t veer to left or right of the oncoming column and continue northward to the border since soldiers were sealing it off.
Andre told them hurriedly, “We’ve come from the southwest, so now let’s bounce to the southeast; and when we shake these troops, bounce back to the border farther east.”
Andre knew it was hopeless. They were an almost exhausted force up against fresh troops with superior numbers, mobility and surveillance. The only thing Andre could do was keep moving and hope for the best. He was feeling the frustration of fighting against unknown odds, and the thought flashed through his mind—maybe, after all, he was over the hill!
What if Mike had been right? What if he no longer had the nerve? They could never outrun these fifty men. Let the Hardwick kid go with the girl. And Nolan with them. He’d ask Waller to stay behind with him. Waller was no good; he’d be no loss to anyone. He and Andre would stay behind and hold the pass while the other three gained time to try for the border again farther east.
“Harvey, you want to make a stand with me and let the others go on?”
Waller didn’t look happy. “I suppose you’re right, Frenchie. Better some of us go under than all.”
Andre stopped at a place with big rocks and some tree trunks where he and Harvey could hold out for a while.
“Keep going,” he ordered the others. “We’ll catch up. Nolan, take over.”
The Nicaraguans were cautious. They came forward two and three men at a time, covered by the others. This slowed them down considerably, so apparently they had a lot of respect for their enemy.
“I guess word has spread about us,” Harvey said proudly. “You want me to take out a few of these pussyfooters?”
“No, let them burn up time and give the others and the girl a head start,” Andre said.
But in spite of their caution, the Nicaraguans were advancing faster than it had first appeared.
