Atlanta Extreme

by Randy Wayne White

  “Can I take my blindfold off yet?” Hawker asked loudly, not sure where the woman was.

  “By all means, Mr. James Hawker,” said a man’s articulate, enthusiastic voice. “Take off your blindfold and climb down off that poor horse. You’ve had a long journey and you must be very hungry.”

  Hawker stripped away the bandanna and blinked into the splotched light of a jungle clearing. Twenty or thirty men encircled him, spreading out from just behind the man who now held out his hand to Hawker. “I am Wellington Curtis, Mr. Hawker,” the man said in his rich Southern accent. “We’re damn glad to have you with us. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long, long time.”

  Hawker slid off the horse and took the man’s firm hand. For a moment he was speechless. This was not the Wellington Curtis he had expected. The Wellington Curtis of his imagination was the one he knew from the dust jackets of the two books on military history: a well-groomed Atlanta aristocrat with gray hair at the temples, wire-rimmed glasses, tweed suit, the stomach paunch of the scholar, and the wry, bemused expression of a middle-aged man who lived his adventures through his typewriter.

  The Wellington Curtis of the dust jackets and the man who now stood before him were two very different people. This Wellington Curtis wore loose khaki pants belted tightly around a lean waist. His chest was broad, covered with matted gray hair, and his arms were long and corded as he rested one hand on a black-handled fighting knife and the other on his military-issue canteen. His face was gaunt beneath a three-day growth of beard, beaming expression, bushy gray eyebrows, and eyes that had a pale, wild look, like someone who had gone too long without food or water. Most striking of all, Curtis’s head had been completely shaved, giving him a sinister, Oriental appearance, like a mad Buddhist monk. The broad, bald head glistened with sweat, and Curtis wiped a big hand over it, flinging the water away.

  “You are hungry?” he repeated. “I have had my men butcher a mountain tapir to celebrate your arrival. Have you ever had tapir, Mr. Hawker? It’s a strange-looking creature, like a cross between an elephant and a mule, but the meat is really damn good. Reminds me of my boyhood days in Georgia when we’d hunt wild hogs and barbecue a couple of tender sow haunches. Better than any pork you’ll ever get back in the states. Unfortunately Laurene tells me that we have company below the mountain, so I’m going to have to ask you to take a snack instead, then we’ll have a full meal later.”

  “You are going to attack them?”

  The older man smiled. “In our own way, Mr. Hawker, in our own way.”

  Curtis turned. Immediately a path cleared for them through the crowd of people. Like Curtis, the men all wore khaki pants, side arms, canteens, and knives. Unlike Curtis, they all wore military-issue fatigue shirts with epaulets, name tags, and gaudy, subdued unit patches bearing a screaming red skull and crossbones. Hawker guessed that the uniforms Curtis had had custom-made for them and were like none he had ever seen, a cross between garish Italian and African white hunter. The men were a mixture of Hispanics and Americans in about a three-to-one ratio. The Hispanics were generally small, lean, intense men with wild, dark eyes and mustaches. The Americans were of the Southern rawboned variety: florid faces, thick necks, gaunt cheeks, sandy hair. Hawker found their presence strangely reassuring. Despite Hollywood’s hackneyed view of the male Southerner as an overweight, tobacco-chewing sadist, Hawker knew that the South consistently produced some of the brightest politicians, scholars, and military leaders in America and, undoubtedly, some of the best athletes. If Curtis had gone insane, it seemed unlikely that he could continue to hold the respect of men such as this. Yet they obviously did respect him. Hawker was beginning to believe that his friend, Jake Hayes, and his lover, Senator Thy Estes, were both wrong about Curtis.

  He would change his mind in a very short time.

  He followed Curtis down a rocky path into a little jungle hollow where a whole village of substantial tree houses had been built high off the ground. Below them and to one side was a long open mess area with stone ovens and plank tables. Next to that was a neat little cottage made of raw clapboard. It had a porch and mosquito screen over the windows. Hawker guessed that this was where Curtis lived, his one concession to his past as a civilized man.

  As they walked, the odd smell again drew Hawker’s attention. He looked up at the side of a rock precipice, and there, for the first time, he saw the source of the sour odor. There, on staves, baking in the tropical sun, were heads. Human heads. Dozens and dozens of them; hundreds of human heads, each on its own pole, mostly men, but there were women, too, and even, it seemed from the distance of a hundred yards, children. The heads all faced the little military compound, the eyes sometimes wide-open and hollow, the mouths thrown open into wild, silent screams.

  Hawker came to a stop, staring.

  Colonel Curtis looked at Hawker, looked at the hillside, then back at Hawker. “Oh, you’ve spotted our trophy case, huh?” He laughed. He gave Hawker a slap on the shoulder that was harder than a friendly slap. “Don’t let it bother you, Mr. Hawker. Or can I call you James?”

  Hawker said nothing but continued to stare.

  “James it is, then,” Curtis rambled on. “I guess a sight like that is a little hard to handle for someone fresh from the outside world. ‘Barbaric,’ they would call it; indeed, as if those lily-fingered hypocrites have the right to call anything we do down here barbaric. They with their factories that are poisoning the earth and their politicians who would sell their mothers for a profit, or their weak-kneed military leaders who no longer have any appreciation for the battlefield. Instead they prefer to incinerate whole populations from a nice sanitary plane six miles high—and they call me barbaric. It’s absurd!”

  The pitch of the man’s voice had risen preceptibly, and his eyes had taken on a pale, haunted look. Hawker caught Curtis’s eyes for just a moment. It was like looking into two embers from hell.

  “It is a little absurd,” Hawker heard himself saying.

  The colonel looked surprised for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “By God, you agree with me!” He slapped Hawker on the shoulder again, this time not as hard. “I like you, James. I like everything I’ve ever heard about you—and you might be surprised at some of my sources. And now to find out that you agree with my thinking … well, by God, it’s just music to these old ears. Shit, this is a day for celebrating! But first we’ve got to pay a neighborly visit to our commie friends. After that we’ll break out the palm wine and the kashiri, have the boys roast the tapir, have ourselves a good talk, then I’ll assign you a nice young girl to relax you before lights-out. How’s that sound?”

  “Actually, Colonel, a talk with you is all I came for—”

  “Hell,” Curtis boomed, “don’t be shy around me, boy! Stroll over to the mess there and grab yourself some tortillas and beans. Get a good shot of water, too, because it may be a while before you get time for another drink. Then I’ll have one of my men fix you up with weapons. I want you to get a firsthand look at how we operate!”

  With that, Curtis left him and began shouting orders at his troops. He used a mixture of Spanish and English, Hawker noted, and when he spoke, his men jumped.

  Hawker took a last long look at the rows of screaming heads on the hillside. Seeing them made the rancid odor seem even stronger. Even so, he walked over to the open-air mess. If he was going to survive in this hellhole, he would have to eat. Bluebottle flies buzzed around the huge cauldron of beans. The stack of tortillas also sat open to the flies. Hawker found a stainless-steel bucket of fruit. He selected two avocados, a small pineapple, a stalk of half a dozen tiny bananas, and two or three other fruits he didn’t recognize. He walked over to the shade of a tree, sat down, and began to eat.

  “You are hungry.”

  The woman stood before him. She had changed into military khaki, like the men. Hawker noted that the pants were too big for her, and she wore lieutenant’s bars on her field cap.

  “Two or three pounds
of fruit a day keeps the doctor away.” He bit into a bright yellow orb and made a face. “This is sour as hell. What is it?”

  The woman smiled. “It is bacuri. We use it for flavoring our drinks.”

  Hawker tossed the small fruit into the bushes. “You ought to put it in those pinto beans. Maybe it would keep the flies away.”

  She sat beside him. “You are angry. Why? Colonel Curtis seems so happy after his meeting with you. He says that you understand each other. He says that you will be friends. Isn’t that true?”

  Hawker broke open the pineapple and began to eat. It was delicious: sweet and pearlike, less stringy than those from Hawaii he had bought from stores. He said nothing.

  “Why do you not answer me?”

  “Because you made me promise not to judge him too quickly.”

  “You do not like him?”

  Hawker motioned to the hillside without looking. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t hire him as my interior decorator.”

  The woman nodded and looked at the ground. “That is why I warned you. I knew … I knew it would be a shock to you. But for us, we who have lived with him these years have come to accept his ways.”

  “The ways of a madman?”

  “He is winning this war for us! Before him, we were a poor band of rebels without organization, without hope. He has brought order to our cause, he has brought many victories! The government forces are terrified of him. Within a few months, he says, we will take Masagua City, the capital. The communist government will collapse and we will be in control!”

  “Curtis will be in control, you mean. Lady, I am no fan of communism, but I’m smart enough to know that any man who lops off heads and decorates his camp with them can’t be much better.”

  “You said that you would not judge him too quickly.”

  Hawker nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You must stay with us at least a week.”

  “I will stay with you for however long it takes me to make up my mind. I keep thinking about what Curtis’s people are doing back in the States. I have heard that his men in Georgia are torturing people, blackmailing people, to get enough money to run this little army of yours. For a time I didn’t think it was true. Now I’m not so sure. I’m going to ask Curtis outright if it is true. He might be nuts, but I think he’s so convinced in his righteousness that he’ll tell me the truth. And, if it is true, I’m going back to the States to stop them.”

  The woman stood up. “It will be that simple?” she said, a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Stopping people is what I do best, Lieutenant.”

  “But you forget one thing, James.”

  “What’s that?”

  Turning to go, the woman said over her shoulder, “You forget that you cannot leave until we say that you can go.”

  eight

  Curtis led a band of fifty men and a few women out into the jungle in the late afternoon.

  Hawker had tried to blend into the group, but Curtis insisted that the vigilante travel on horseback at the head of the column so that the two of them could talk.

  “You see,” Curtis said, pointing at the bruised thunderheads forming above the high canopy of jungle, “that is our cover. In guerrilla warfare a force must take advantage of all the disadvantages nature offers. In a rain forest we try to attack under the cover of rain. The government forces don’t like rain. They are soft and spoiled by comforts. The rain wrinkles their nice dry clothes. It gets into their boots and gives them blisters when they march.” The American laughed gaily. “But my men love the rain. It cloaks our noise, and it is a natural camouflage. A security guard can’t see much when there is rain dripping into his eyes.”

  Overhead, the black clouds swirled like smoke in the tops of the great trees. There was a blinding flash of light, a boom that shook the earth, and then the rain began to fall.

  Hawker had never seen such rain. It fell out of the trees not in individual drops but in a deluge, a river of water pouring off the huge jungle leaves.

  To talk now, Curtis practically had to shout. “The government forces are looking for our camp,” he said. “We have covered the trail, laid false trails, but even so, ultimately they will find it.”

  “Then why don’t you wait in ambush?” Hawker called back.

  “Because that is what they expect us to do. Certainly that is what they would do. But you see, James, the key to our success is the unexpected. All modesty aside, I must tell you that they have no military leader who possesses my background, my knowledge of practical warfare. That is why we are beating them. Beating them damn badly, I might add. I have used all the important elements of guerrilla warfare: surprise, mobility, and terror. Yes, terror is an important factor in this kind of war. I will admit that in my first year here I was reluctant to take the necessary steps. For instance, I saw the enemy as only the men trained and employed as government troops. It took me a little while to realize that our enemy was anyone—absolutely anyone—in this country who did not pick up arms and follow me. That was the key; that change in my thinking is what has produced all of our success. For me, fighting was really more of a complex seventeenth-century duel between two honorable gentlemen. The British made the same mistake during our own revolution, the Marines almost made it against the Japanese during the Second World War, and our entire political establishment made the mistake during Vietnam. There can be nothing honorable about guerrilla warfare.”

  “Does that same philosophy hold true for your men back in the States, Greg Warren and what’s-his-name Pendleton?”

  “Shawn Pendleton—and you’re goddamn right it holds true!” Curtis snapped, swinging around in his saddle. “They have been sent back to Georgia to do a job, and they will, by God, do that job at any cost!”

  “Even if it includes extortion? And blackmail? And murder?”

  Curtis’s face was growing red beneath the bushy gray eyebrows. “There’s no such thing as blackmail and murder in this kind of war, friend. There is only victory. Or defeat. Don’t you understand? There are no rules! That is what the loser learns but always too late! In this kind of war you must do anything, absolutely anything, that is necessary to win!”

  “I wasn’t aware that there was a war going on in Georgia,” Hawker replied calmly.

  Curtis laughed more to himself than to anyone. His eyes were glassy. “Wherever you find Captains Warren and Pendleton, friend, you are going to find some kind of war,” he said. “They are my two best men. I hated to part with them, hated to send them back to the world. But it had to be done. I ran out of money more than a year ago. My so-called friends, the cowards, decided to stop contributing to the cause because of some nasty little stories they read in one of those left-wing pseudo newsmagazines. So that left us without money. No money source at all. The American CIA wouldn’t offer a dime. They back every other gook, chink, and rebel sand nigger in the world, and they wouldn’t chance a dime on an American who has already proved that he can win. So what were we supposed to do? You need money to run a war, friend. Lots of it. So I decided that if my rich friends wouldn’t contribute voluntarily, we would make them contribute. I knew that wouldn’t be easy to do, so I sent my two best officers. Pendleton and Warren both have their heads on right. They had their heads on right long before me; hell, they knew all about how to win—really win—long before they even came to the jungle. When they first got here, they did things that turned my stomach. Things to women and children in the villages that made me want to vomit. I warned them twice, then I brought them up on court-martial charges and found them guilty. All the other men were afraid of them. I decided to carry out the execution myself. So I tied them up against a tree and drew out my service revolver. You should have seen them. The two of them just sort of stood there looking at me, a kind of weird smile on their faces. Pendleton, he’s a great big son of a bitch. He called out to me, ‘Don’t make a mess of it, Colonel. Shoot straight, damn it!’” Curtis banged his fist on his saddle and looked at Hawker. “
That’s when I realized. It was like something popped in my head, like a bright light. It was an awakening! I knew in that moment that both Pendleton and Warren had been right all along. They were the only two in the whole fucking camp who knew how to win this war, and here I was, about to shoot them. Hell, I was the one who should have been shot! Shot for incompetence! I was telling my people to fight a textbook war in a type of conflict that is fifty thousand years old. There is only one true path to victory in such a war: the path of terror! I untied Pendleton and Warren, promoted them both to captain, then asked them to help lay out an entirely new course of action in our war against the communists. Within a week we had our first great victory. We have had nothing but victories since.”

  “And you don’t mind that the innocent people of Georgia suffer so that you can win a tiny war two thousand miles away?”

  Curtis looked at him oddly. “Are you saying that I’m wrong?”

  The pale eyes bored into Hawker, and he knew that how he answered would be the difference in his own life or death. Curtis’s hand rested uneasily on the grip of his .45 automatic pistol. Hawker carried his own Beretta in the shoulder holster in plain view, and slung over his back was an M16 with a full clip he had selected from the camp arsenal. The vigilante didn’t doubt that he could kill Curtis where he sat, if need be. But he also knew that Curtis’s men would shoot him down before he had a chance to kick his horse into full gallop.

  Hawker saw in the colonel’s eyes that his very life depended on how he answered.

  Trying not to cringe at the lie, Hawker said, “Wrong? Hell, no, I don’t think you’re wrong, Colonel.…” And in his mind he continued, I think you’re as crazy as a bag lady, but I don’t think you’re wrong.

  Wellington Curtis threw back his shaved head and laughed loudly. “God damn it, Hawker, you had me worried there for a minute. I thought maybe you had come down here to put together information on my operation so you could go back to the world and squeeze Pendleton and Warren.” The man’s gaze grew sharp once again. “By the way, James, why did you come here?”