by J. B. Hadley
“Sounds like Russian,” Mike said.
“Let me handle it,” Lance offered. He shouted some—thing in a foreign language across the field to the man, and he responded in that language enthusiastically and began to come to meet them.
“He speaks Czech, Mike,” Lance said. “I can handle it, but what about all of you?”
“Go to meet him before he reaches us,” Mike said. “Tell him we’re in a hurry. Say we’re geologists.”
“I don’t know the Czech word for that. My mother spoke to me in Czech all the time, but she never once mentioned geology.”
Lance met the man midway, talked with him for a few minutes and then hurried back.
“I told him we were Czech agricultural experts here to gauge the volcano damage so our government could send aid. As soon as he heard the word ‘aid,’ he told us we could go where we liked so far as he was concerned but that we’ll need a clearance from the army up ahead to enter the danger zone.”
Lance showed Mike a travel permit the man had given him. From this point on, when they ran into various armed civilian patrols, Lance did the talking in Czech with some Spanish words thrown in and displayed their travel permit. A lot of Czech and almost no Spanish seemed the best formula. As in every communist country, a certain percent—age of the population was employed in running surveil—lance on the rest, and there seemed to be armed cadres of the dedicated all over the place to prod those who were less enthusiastic about their socialist paradise. These cadres were the big shots locally, but they always backed off in respectful awe when Lance spouted Czech at them. Maybe they thought it was Russian.
The mercs began noticing people on the hill paths driving burros loaded with pots and bedding, obviously refugees from the evacuated area. As the mercs neared the base of the smoke-shrouded mountain, they were passed by army trucks filled with people and their belongings. At this altitude, the ground was open—or at most covered with low evergreens—so that there was no way they could hope to sneak through the army checkpoints they saw ahead.
“Just keep walking,” Mike said. “We’ll aim for the midpoint between the two checkpoints.”
As they walked through, they heard shouts. Finally, a Russian-built imitation Jeep bounced across the rough ground toward them. Lance stopped to meet it while the others walked on. He rejoined them shortly, and the vehicle returned to the checkpoint, but Lance seemed less than contented.
“I gave him the bit about Czech government aid and I think he understood me, though he spoke only Spanish. But he’s one of these pushy young going-somewhere-in-a-hurry officer types. He said he would have to radio in to HQ to get verification on us. I told him not to bother; that we’d been approved and could not be delayed. I bet the little fartface radios in all the same and finds out no one has ever heard about us Czechs out here. Better not let them see us quicken our pace, guys.”
Mike said nothing. They were now well uphill of the army checkpoints.
“What I can’t understand,” Sally said, “is why they don’t put out an a11-points bulletin or whatever you call it.”
“Then they’d have to admit you were in Nicaragua,” Andre said.
Mike plodded uphill silently. The light was noticeably darkening as they climbed up under the cloud of smoke which had appeared black from a distance, but which they could now see comprised all sorts of olive, green, yellow and even purple coiling smoke as well as black and brown.
“You wouldn’t live ten seconds trying to breathe that smoke,” Andre said loudly for Mike’s benefit as they climbed nearer to the dense cloud.
The smoke rolled down the slope high above them and then lifted off to hover over their heads. Mike kept climbing in a steady, preoccupied way.
They heard a volley of shots from downhill.
“Don’t look back,” Mike said. “Just keep going like you haven’t heard a thing.”
Another volley of shots.
“They’re still only shooting in the aft,” Andre said, with a hint in his voice that they might not continue to do so.
“Keep going,” Mike said. “That officer has probably made a radio call, like Lance said he would, but he can’t be sure yet who the hell we are. And he doesn’t want seven dead Czechs on his hands because somebody at HQ goofed and forgot to mention they were here. He’ll be up to talk with us again. When he comes, I want you to drive, Joe.”
“What?” Nolan asked.
“You heard me,” Mike snapped.
Sure enough, a half minute later they heard the imitation Jeep laboring up the slope after them.
“Talk to him, Lance,” Mike said. “Get him away from the vehicle.”
Lance led the zealous officer away from the Soviet Jeep and launched into fluent Czech expostulations, with occasional Spanish phrases thrown in to further mystify him. Apart from the driver, two Nicaraguan regulars remained in the vehicle and covered the team with a Soviet PK machine gun. These two would be hard to fool.
Lance was smiling and shaking hands with the officer, who seemed a bit confused and unhappy. Lance shouted at the three Nicaraguans still in the Jeep and gestured at them to get out. They looked at their officer, who nodded his head uncertainly. Lance spoke volubly to Mike and the team in what they assumed was Czech and gestured for them to get in the vehicle. Harvey settled in behind the machine gun. As Joe Nolan drove away, Lance looked back and waved to the Nicaraguans.
Manuel had never seen Paulo in such a rage. Manuel was often afraid of Paulo, even when he was in his sunniest moods, so that now with Paulo’s face gray from exhaustion, his eyes bloodshot, his huge frame trembling with fury, Manuel sent a quick prayer to the Virgin that he was not the one who was at fault.
Esteban stubbed a forefinger on the map spread before him. “What do you see there?”
Manuel looked. “Mountains? Ah, that volcano which became active, where they evacuated those people.”
“What would you say to seven armed Czechs in that area?” Esteban asked.
“Czechs? I don’t think so. You’re sure they’re not Russians?”
“Czechs.”
“I don’t think so,” Manuel repeated, trying not to cause offense.
“What if I told you that one of the seven was a blond female?”
Manuel’s jaw dropped.
Esteban went on, “What if I also told you that an officer of the Nicaraguan army lent them a vehicle and a PK machine gun?”
“Santa Maria.”
When they woke at dawn, they all felt queasy from the noxious fumes they had been breathing ever since arriving at the volcano. While daylight held, they had driven south around the volcanic cone at a level higher than its base. They used the meager shelter of the Soviet Jeep in which to sleep—except for Harvey, who claimed it would be an easier and quicker death to be caught in the open by a shower of hot cinders from the crater above them. Al—though the earth trembled periodically throughout the night, there was no fire and brimstone—only headaches from the fumes in the air, as if they had drunk and smoked too much.
The coiling smoke cloud still hung above them like an enormous thunderhead about to release a deluge, and the early morning daylight had that eerie brightness often associated with an approaching thunderstorm. The mountain slope was bare and exposed except for scraggy grass. There were no hiding places here, not even cover from attack. They understood now why Mike was keeping them higher up the slope than they thought healthy—that black cloud was their protection from the air.
But the cloud was not low enough to prevent choppers from coming in and searching for them. They heard their engines and then saw them before they were sighted themselves. A gunship tried a flyover from their rear. If the barren ground gave them no protection, it also made sneak attacks on them impossible. Harvey lay on the floor of the Jeep, and his machine gun spattered 7.62 mm bullets at the oncoming chopper. Its glass cowling shattered, and the pilot took the craft nose-up into the smoke to avoid the PK’s bullets.
The chopper came down in
to visibility again a few hundred yards downhill from them. Its door gunner scraped paint off the Jeep’s hood as he raked them with fire.
Harvey returned fire from the bouncing vehicle, and they saw the door gunner fall back into the chopper’s interior and his machine gun swing loose on its mount.
Waller’s Russian gun had a 250-round square belt box and a cyclic rate of 650 rpm. He gave the chopper everything the PK had to give. The helicopter skewed sideways like a horse hit hard with a whip, and then kind of shuddered and sounded like a broken-down truck, till suddenly it dipped its nose and bit the dust.
They saw the chopper lie on the ground for a half second before it was consumed in a great fiery ball, which made Harvey whisper “Goddam” in awestruck admiration, like a connoisseur of beauty before a perfect work of art.
Two other helicopters made a wide swing around them, well out of the PK’s range, which Harvey figured at about one thousand yards. The choppers came down about a mile ahead of the mercs but could not touch down safely on the steep mountain slope. Instead, each chopper rested one skid on the uphill side, with the second skid hovering in thin air, and unloaded airborne assault troops. The two choppers lifted off as the soldiers spread quickly up and down the slope to intercept the approaching vehicle.
Once they came in range, Harvey fired a machine-gun burst over Joe’s head as he drove the Jeep, and four or five of the Nicaraguans went down like ninepins.
After that, the Nicaraguan assault troops lay in the grass and waited, invisible. Joe Nolan slowed and waited for Mike’s instructions.
“Stop,” Mike said.
Mike decided to make a vertical downhill run from where they were and then continue cutting around the base of the mountain. This would add a lot of miles to their journey and open them up to who knew what kind of troubles away from the smoke cloud’s protection and out of the crater’s danger zone.
Mike was just about to tell Joe to make the downhill turn when he saw the assault troops ahead jump to their feet and start running downhill. Some of them dropped their rifles; others looked fearfully behind them.
“Push on!” Mike yelled to Joe, who threw the fake Jeep into gear and lurched forward.
They were making good speed across the bumpy, grassy terrain, and the Nicaraguans were too busy running from whatever ailed them to intercept the mercs, when Joe saw, directly ahead of the Jeep, a long ribbon of moving gray stuff that steamed like cooked oatmeal.
“Lava!” Mike shouted.—
Joe turned the steering wheel, brought the Jeep sharply about and drove alongside the moving lava. They saw now that this was just one of many fast-moving fingers of a more slowly moving broad front of molten rock descending the mountainside. They saw too what had terrified the Nicaraguan airborne assault troops, who were still hoofing it downhill before them. The fingers of lava, moving at the rate of a fast walk, broke without warning into rapidly moving rivulets that rejoined each other farther downhill, leaving islands of grass cut off by the lava channels.
One soldier found himself cut off on a diamond-shaped island maybe fifteen feet long. He ran its length and, in a spectacularly long jump, successfully cleared a rivulet of molten rock at its narrowest point.
Mike told Joe, “We won’t go down any farther than we have to. Drive across through this shit.”
“We’ve used up nearly all our reserve gas anyway,” Joe said philosophically—and swung the vehicle toward a lava stream and tried accelerating across.
The four tires blew on contact, and the rubber was cooked off the wheel rims in seconds. It took two minutes to cross the fifty-foot-wide lava stream less than six inches deep.
Halfway across, Joe called back, “Harvey, get out and push.”
Back on the grass on the other side of the lava stream, running on the rims was slow and laborious.
“I can see two more streams ahead at this level,” Mike said, standing up. “Then we can chuck the Jeep and head for Lake Nicaragua.”
They could now see its blue vastness in the distance.
When they saw that some of the Nicaraguan forces had stopped running before the lava, they grew wary, thinking they had turned to fife on them. Then they saw that these men, about eight in all, had been trapped on a grass island among braided rivulets of lava. As the Jeep slowly plowed its way through a second lava stream, sometimes spinning its wheels as if in mud and threatening to stall in midstream, they had plenty of time to see how the Nicaraguans were faring.
Although both sides were within easy firing range of each other, all thought of hostilities had ceased. The competition of man against nature had for the moment become stronger than that of man against man. The mercs would even have helped the marooned soldiers, had they been able to do so without endangering themselves.
At first it seemed as if the eight soldiers had only to outwait the lava flow on their island and then escape when the flow waned and the molten rock hardened. However, it soon became evident that a major volume of the central mass of lava was flowing their way, and the channels of moving gray matter were visibly swelling and thickening—and their island shrinking.
The eight men changed from helping one another to crowding one another on their increasingly small patch of solid ground amid lava streamlets too wide to leap. Then the two weakest were pushed off by the others.
As the two fell full-length into the molten rock, they seemed to die instantly—like lobsters dropped into boiling water. The others watched horrified as their flesh was consumed and the white knobs of their yellow bones pushed through, as the corpses were dragged over the ground by the creeping shallow tide.
A lava stream was pinched into a strait at one point, too wide for a man to clear with a single leap. One soldier prepared to jump, clearly hoping to save himself by sacrificing the foot he would have to place in the lava for his second leap. On the other side lay a much larger island than their own—with higher ground where a man would almost certainly be safe from the lava flow if he could reach it.
The soldier jumped, pushing off with his right foot and landing on his left more than ankle deep in lava, three-quarters of the way across the channel. His left foot was no more than a second in the melted rock, and then he leaped again and made it to safety on the far side.
All that remained of his left foot was the gleaming white bones, like those of a well-cleaned skeleton.
By the time the Jeep had negotiated the lava flow, crossed a stretch of grassy land and entered the last flow in their path, there was only one man left on the original and still-diminishing island. He had pushed the others off. He now stood on a little mound of stones he had built for himself and stared at the implacable smoking gray stuff creeping slowly beneath his feet.
Chapter 18
THEY got to the eastern shore of Lake Nicaragua at sunset. The lake was so huge—forty-five miles wide and one hundred long—they found it hard to believe this was not the Pacific Ocean. They had little time or inclination to admire the magnificent sunset over the waters, and headed wearily south along its shore. The moon’s first quarter gave them sufficient light to continue after dark, and Mike decided to make as much progress as they could under cover of night. He reckoned they were one-third of the way down the lake’s eastern shore, about seventy miles from the Costa Rican border and freedom. This would be a two-day trek at the minimum, over rough land, a period which would give the Nicaraguan authorities adequate time to ensure their capture. He had to find a quicker and less exhausting way to travel.
When they saw a small town ahead on the lakeshore, Mike ordered a halt. Rowboats, some with outboard motors attached, were pulled up on the land before the town. Such boats would certainly beat walking. They could travel all night on the lake and reach the border sometime tomorrow. But offshore there was something better yet—by moonlight they could see the white shape of a launch about thirty-five feet long, anchored, without lights.
“Bob, you’re our boat expert,” Mike said. “Think you can start her?”
Bob nodded.
Mike pointed to Lance, and all three of them stripped to their shorts and buckled on belts holding a sheathed Marine Corps combat knife.
“If you see any triangular fins,” Mike told them with a smile, “they’re for real. I’ve heard this lake is crawling with freshwater sharks. The lake was once an inlet of the sea and got cut off by a volcano or an earthquake, so the sharks became landlocked.”
“I promise not to feed them,” Bob said.
The others stayed where they were. Andre would signal by flashlight when they got the launch under way, and they would bring it inshore to pick them up. Mike entered the water where they were, in spite of it being a half-mile swim, because he felt they could not risk being seen by townspeople. One person seeing them could spoil the whole thing, since the townspeople could move faster in their small boats than the mercs could swim.
The water was calm, there were no currents, and it was pleasantly warm, so they made good time out to the anchored launch. All three hung on to one of its two anchor ropes. The ropes were thin and made of nylon. They would not be easy to climb. It would be simpler to go up over the side of the launch.
They swam to its side, which loomed about three feet over their heads, and listened. They heard no sound but that of wavelets slapping against the timbers of the boat. The cabin windows and navigation lights were dark.
Mike treaded water, fists forward and elbows held in at his sides. Lance and Bob grabbed an elbow each and heaved upward simultaneously, lifting Mike out of the water as they sank beneath him, displacing his weight. Mike clutched the gunwale with both hands and hauled himself up so that he balanced on his belly with his legs still over the side.
A soldier with a Kalashnikov across his legs sat huddled against the opposite gunwale fast asleep. If Mike had come up on the opposite side of the boat, he would have been right on top of him! Mike balanced where he was for a moment, ready to push back into the water at a second’s notice, while he scanned the foredeck and peered into the darkness beyond the open cabin door.
