Atlanta Extreme

by Randy Wayne White

  “Only knives!” weasel-face sputtered under his breath.

  Hawker gave him a searing look. “If Sergeant Miles fires a green flare, that means that there are no government troops, mister. It means that there are only women and children and old men in the village. It means that even without firearms it will be like killing fish in a barrel. Do women and children and old men frighten you, mister?”

  “I … I didn’t think of it that way, sir. When you put it that way, it sounds kind of fun.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, fuckhead—to make sure you have fun.” Hawker had been squatting; now he stood. “Okay. It will probably take Sergeant Miles and me about twenty or thirty minutes to scope out the village. You men are not to move under any circumstances—repeat, under any circumstances—until you see a red or green flare. Understand?”

  They understood.

  Hawker nodded to Miles, and the two men headed down the hill. When they were out of earshot, Miles whispered, “We’re not really going down to the village, are we? We’re skipping out, right? Hell, that was a great idea, Mr. Hawker! With a half-hour lead they’ll never catch us.”

  “Yeah, but we won’t have a half-hour lead because I really am going into the village. You’ll stop at the line of trees and hold my weapons. I don’t want to scare anybody when I go in.”

  “And then what? What the hell are you going to do when you get down there?”

  Hawker put the M16 on the ground and unbuckled the belt that held his canteen and cheap production military knife. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m going to have to play it by ear.”

  Hawker was sure what he wanted to do, but he still felt uncomfortable telling Miles. What if the sergeant’s story were an elaborate setup? At least, thought the vigilante, I can save most of these villagers. If I’m lucky.

  As Hawker walked into the village he forced himself to relax, put a broad, easy smile on his face, and let his arms hang loose, like some benevolent uncle coming to call. He took care to stay close to the circle of chikees so that he could not be seen from the far hillside where Curtis and his troops waited. As he did he confirmed what he had noticed on the hike over: the edge of the village drifted into the line of trees not far from the river. It would be the one exit not open to easy view. When the village dogs saw him, they came to attention, ragged ears held high, then set off the alarm, barking wildly. The stickball game stopped; infants ran; mothers stood to stare. From beside the cooking fire in the center of the yard, an old man stood. He wore a brightly colored serape, still wet from the storm just past. His eyes were milky with age; his face gaunt, sun-blotched. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but he walked fearlessly toward Hawker.

  The vigilante held up his hand, feeling ridiculously like Tonto on the Lone Ranger.

  “Buenos días, señor.”

  The old man said nothing.

  “I have come as a friend.”

  The old man stared.

  “Habla Español? Habla Inglés?”

  He said finally, “For what purpose do you come to our village? You are not of these parts.” The old man spoke the slow, formal Spanish of the mountains, probably heavily accented with Mayan, though Hawker did not know the language well enough to be sure.

  “I have come to tell you of—” What was the Spanish word for danger? Peligro? Yes, peligro. “I have come to tell you of danger. To warn you. In the hills waiting to attack are soldiers, guerreros. You must take your people away. Peligro grande. The danger is very great.”

  The village women had collected behind the old man.

  The old man gazed up into the hills, then back at Hawker. “Do you speak of the evil white man? Do you speak of his soldiers, the ones who take heads?”

  “Si. It is the evil white man of which I speak. They will be coming soon. You must leave quickly.”

  “Why do you, an Americano, come to warn us?”

  “Because we are not all evil ones.”

  “Yes, that is so,” the old man said simply.

  Hawker motioned toward the chikees that disappeared into the trees. “You must go now! That way!” Hawker pointed to the far hillside and to the hill behind where Miles waited. “The soldiers are there and there. To escape you must stay hidden. Send the hijos, your sons, back out to play. They must be the last to leave. The soldiers will become suspicious if everyone disappears at once. Are your boys brave enough to do such a thing? To wait until the women are gone, then to run?”

  “Like all boys, they are not so brave. But like few boys, they do as they are told. It will be done.”

  “Is there a safe place where your village can hide?”

  “Yes, not far, in a hidden cave, there is such a place.”

  Hawker took the old man’s hand. “Please hurry. There is not much time.”

  “This evil man, the one who seeks heads, will he not now kill you?”

  “Only if I do not kill him first.”

  The old man nodded his simple understanding. “Then I wish you luck, my friend. On such a quest you will need great good luck.…”

  Doug Miles blended into the jungle so well in his camouflage that Hawker jumped when the blond-haired sergeant stepped out into the path. “You all set? You warn the villagers?”

  “Yeah,” said Hawker. “Any movement from the seven up above?”

  “No, that little tongue-lashing you gave Blake really put the fear of God in them. They won’t move until they see a flare.” Miles looked across the valley where the boys had resumed their game. “Why are those kids still out there? Hell, Curtis isn’t going to wait much longer. In about five minutes, if he doesn’t see our signal, he’s going to shoot off that gun to signal us to attack. And when we don’t, he’s going to go raging in there like a brushfire. Those kids will be slaughtered.”

  “The women and old men are escaping now. When they’re gone, the boys are going to run for it.”

  Miles whistled softly. “That’s cutting it awfully close, Mr. Hawker.”

  “There’s no other way. If all activity in the village stops, Curtis won’t wait. He’ll go right in to see what’s wrong.”

  Miles shook his head. “I’ll tell you, between the fucking communists and Curtis, these people really get the peanutty end of the stick. Hell, all they want to do is live, work, and eat their beans at the end of the day.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Hawker strapped on his webbed belt and picked up the M16. “We’d better get going, Miles. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover and not much time. Which way?”

  “Straight up the mountain, Mr. Hawker. They won’t expect that. They’ll expect us to follow the valley back toward Guatemala. Since that’s the closest civilization, that’s where Curtis will expect us to head.”

  Hawker smiled. “You weren’t kidding. You have thought about this escape plan, haven’t you?”

  “Every fucking night since the first week I was here,” Miles said grimly.

  “The first week?”

  “Yeah, about ten months ago. Like I said, I came to fight communists. Instead Curtis stuck a machete in my hand, pushing me into the center of camp, and made me chop off the head of a little girl. Since that night I’ve spent every waking hour planning this escape. Maybe it’s because when I’m asleep, all I ever dream about is that poor little child.”

  Hawker gave the big man a gentle push in the back. “Let’s get going. If it makes you feel any better, Sergeant, you helped save a lot of kids today.”

  Miles brightened. “Yeah, that’s true. Hey, you’re right! Hell, I actually did something good today. Kind of makes up for it a little bit, doesn’t it? Hell, we’ve got clear sailing from here.”

  But it wasn’t clear sailing. Half an hour later, well up the mountain and out of personal danger except for the rapids of the Rio Espiritu, the headhunters, and the communist troops of Masagua, Hawker stopped to look down into the valley.

  Later in his life the vigilante would often wish that he had never stopped, never looked.


  But he did. A moment earlier the boys of the village had dropped their sticks and made a show of ending the game for the benefit of the soldiers who watched from the hills. Hawker knew it meant that the women were safely hidden, and now the boys would follow.

  Calmly they trotted back toward the chikees as if to dinner. In truth, they would continue running until they got to the cave where their mothers were waiting. But most of the boys never made it to the cave. From out of the line of trees soldiers charged them, led by Wellington Curtis on his rangy white horse.

  Just behind and to his left, on a brown horse, rode Laurene Catacomez.

  Both of them carried swords.

  Absorbed by the jungle, the gunfire was a distant, muted popping, like the sound of a distant woodpecker. But Hawker could see pale puffs of smoke as the weapons jolted in the hands of the toy soldiers, and he could see the small brown boys tumble, fall, and scratch their way toward the trees, toward safety, on their scarlet bellies.

  In tandem, Curtis and the woman chased the running children, cutting them down with their swords. A small boy of about ten, weary from running, held up his hands to protect his face from the charging horses—and both of his arms were cut off at the elbows. Another boy took a slash from Curtis that cut him from the shoulder and deep into his chest, yet he continued to run—only to have his throat cut by the woman.

  Hawker felt someone tugging at his arm, and it took him a moment to realize that it was Sergeant Miles. “Come on, Mr. Hawker, don’t look no more. It ain’t good for you to watch that shit. You’ll have the bad dream like I got. Don’t look no more, man.”

  “They’re worse than animals,” Hawker whispered, still watching in disbelief.

  “They ain’t worth your time, Mr. Hawker. Come on, it’s just like you said—it’s all behind us now. We don’t ever have to come back to this goddamn place.” The vigilante noticed only peripherally that the big man was crying, crying for the children who now fell in the far valley.

  Hawker turned slowly away, his gray eyes blazing. “You’re wrong, sergeant. I do have to come back. I’m going to go to Atlanta first, but someday soon I’m going to return. And when I do, I’ll wipe every trace of Wellington Curtis and his people from the face of this earth.…”

  eleven

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Even at nine A.M. the heat was beginning to dominate Atlanta. The sun rose over the red-clay counties of Elbert, Wilkes, Oglethorpe, then hit the glass and white-stone skyscrapers of Atlanta, the burned brick of the Underground with its plush shops and cutesy boutiques, the hard gray geometries of the Journal and Constitution building, the steel and aluminized windows of Ted Turner’s empire, the asphalt streets, the concrete apartment houses, the slums and suburbs and colonial mansions of one of the South’s most modern cities.

  James Hawker stepped out of the canned chill of his hotel and climbed into an oven disguised as a bright yellow rental car. He rolled down the windows, turned the air on full, and by the time he had turned from Auburn Avenue onto West Peachtree, the car was sufficiently wind-blasted that he could roll the windows back up.

  Not far from the Federal Building, which was across from St. Joseph Infirmary and Harris Park, Hawker matched the address of a nondescript brownstone duplex with an address written on a piece of paper. A small bronze plaque outside said that it was the office of Hale & Sons, Exporters, by appointment only, please.

  Hawker knew it to be a safehouse operated by the CIA.

  He parked on a side street, trotted up the steps, slowly rang the bell three times, then twice quickly. Games. CIA games. Everything had to be in code.

  The door cracked, then was thrown open.

  “James! By God, it’s good to see you. Come on in!” Jerry Rehfuss, CIA operative and, once upon a time, Hawker’s friend, greeted him warmly and ushered him inside. “Come on up to the office. It’s cooler. This damn central air doesn’t work worth a crap, but they’ve installed a couple of window units up there that will freeze your knees off. God, I’d forgotten how shitty it is working in the field. Washington’s got me spoiled.”

  The vigilante followed the rangy, red-haired man up the steps. From the other offices he could hear muted voices, the plastic clatter of a computer keyboard, the bong and ding of a switchboard, the rattle of a printer, but he saw no one else; every door was closed.

  Rehfuss’s temporary office had a green steel desk and a vinyl chair and couch, also green. There was a photograph of the president and an American flag behind the desk.

  “Very nice,” said Hawker, not smiling. “Almost a little too plush for good taste.”

  Rehfuss laughed—laughed too hard—and recovered quickly when he realized that he was forcing it. “Same old James. Same wicked sarcasm. Hey! You look pretty good. Senator Thy Estes told me you’d had a rough trip back. Said it had taken you about a week. You’ve lost some weight, but other than that … Hey, how’d you get that scar on your face? God, that must have taken twenty stitches—”

  “Twenty-five stitches. I had a little canoeing accident.”

  “Canoeing accident? Jesus, you’re lucky you didn’t bleed to death.”

  “Some Indians found us, fixed us up. They put a splint on my friend’s arm and some kind of poultice on this.” Hawker pointed to the white welt of flesh on the left side of his face.

  “But they didn’t stitch you up—”

  “There was a pretty good American doctor in Masagua City. Runs a tiny little infirmary on the back side of the town. He did it. Said there would hardly even be a trace of a scar.”

  Rehfuss was suddenly interested. “An American doctor in Masagua? We are damn short of operatives in that country. Of course, we’re not supposed to be there at all, but we maintain a few connections. That doctor could be a real windfall. Why in the hell do you think he’s there? Running from some kind of criminal charge, maybe? Or he could be a junkie—a lot of doctors get hooked on their own wares. He’d be a lot closer to the source down there.”

  Hawker simply shook his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

  Rehfuss, uneasy, rubbed his hands together and assumed the friendly grin. “Well, what the hell. I’ll have one of our people check into it. Geez, it’s damn good to see you, James. You really do look fine, considering the shit you’ve just been through.”

  Again Hawker did not respond. He knew he did not look fine, because he had indeed gone through some shit. Sergeant Miles’s three-day escape had taken eight days. The canoe or boat he’d planned to steal turned out to be a tiny hand-hewn dugout. The “few rapids” of the Rio Espiritu turned out to be a series of roaring torrents with crosscurrent swells the size of houses, all crammed between sheer rock walls. By the time they heard the falls—and they did hear it; even above the wild roar of the river, the falls sounded like a sustained train crash—it was too late to do anything about it. They couldn’t have gotten to shore if they had wanted to, and if they had, there was no way to get up the cliffs. So they had gone over the falls. Miraculously Hawker wasn’t knocked unconscious. He managed to grab Miles by the collar of the shirt and steer the two of them to a little beach at the mouth of a stream that fed into the killer river. There the irony of Miles’s bad planning took a brighter turn. The fierce headhunter Indians he had described were not fierce at all. They were a mild, shy people whose males did indeed belt their penises to their stomachs. But they seemed less interested in the heads of the two strange white men than they were in healing their wounds. After a day of rest Hawker selected a larger dugout—for which he traded his fighting knife—and they paddled the rest of the way to Masagua City without incident.

  But the eight days had been tough ones. Both men had gotten gastroenteritis from drinking river water, and it was impossible to eat or drink anything without immediately having to squat in the bushes. The gash on Hawker’s face got infected—but not until they had spent two nights in a cockroach-infested hotel in Masagua City. Both mornings he awoke, he noticed that the dressing the doctor had sent
to put on his face was disappearing. He finally realized that the cockroaches were eating it off during the night.

  So the vigilante knew that he did not look fine. When he stared at himself in the mirror, he saw a sun-darkened, gaunt imitation of his old self. The most disturbing thing, though, was the hollow, bleary look in his pale gray eyes. They had a troubled, haunted look, so much so that looking in the mirror was like looking into the face of some stranger who had seen the depths of hell.

  Hawker had seen those bleak depths, and he continued to see them in his troubled sleep: screaming children being hacked to death as they tried to run to their mothers.

  In the vigilante’s mind it was his plan that had killed the children. He was the one who insisted that they stay and play while the women and old men escaped. It had been his own attempt at cleverness that had brought them face-to-face with horror, face-to-face with what the old Indian man had described as the White Evil One.

  There were better plans—a hundred better plans he could have used that would have saved the entire village. Hawker had thought of them all in detail during that long, brutal trip to Masagua City.

  But he had thought of them too late. Now he had to live with his own guilt, his own inner Evil One.

  Hawker tapped his fingers on the steel desk and said, “Let’s cut the bullshit, huh, Jerry? Yes, I look fine and it’s a nice day and the weather is hot and Washington has more comfortable offices for its top CIA operatives. But I’m not here to discuss that. I’m here to talk about two of Wellington Curtis’s hit men, Shawn Pendleton and Greg Warren. They have been extorting money from the people of Georgia to finance Curtis’s Masaguan guerrilla forces. They are also suspected in several murders, though nothing can be proved because the people they have been hitting on are understandably scared shitless. And if they can scare the people of Georgia, they can scare anyone in this world. So the state law wants them, but they can’t get proof, and they can’t get anyone to testify. The federal law wants them, but they can’t prove a federal case, and if they could, they’d run into the same problems with witnesses. So they’ve involved your people because you have a little freer rein on how you move, how you attack. But since Jimmy Carter made it illegal for you to participate in any kind of assassination plot anyplace, anytime, for any reason—there’s irony for you—the good people of Georgia are stuck with these ghouls unless you bring in someone from the outside. Isn’t that just about the way things stand?”