by Lou Cameron
After sundown and a shared supper of tinned bully beef and beans with Decepciona, Gaston, and Gaston’s new girl, a skinny little thing with a lot of xs in her unpronounceable Indian name, Captain Gringo ordered a good night’s sleep all around. He added, “I mean it, Gaston. I know you like to explore new territory. So do I. But don’t wear yourself out on Miss X. She doesn’t have to run like a deer mañana. You and I may have to.”
Gaston said he understood, that he’d decided to call her Mimi in honor of another brunette he knew, and that he’d only go around the world with her once.
Decepciona had hung her own hammock in Captain Gringo’s new hut. The Indians knew all too well that while two people could screw in one hammock, sleeping double in them was out of the question. That was fine with him. He’d thought after that orgy in the jungle that he’d had enough of her for now. But they did a little commuting anyhow when the mosquitoes woke them up despite the citronella oil in the wee small hours and he saw that, while he had a morning hard-on, it was too late to bother going back to sleep. Decepciona said she was glad she was forgiven, when they played swing in her hammock.
But he husbanded his strength by ejaculating in her only once and insisting on an early breakfast. She accepted this as she accepted all life’s pleasures. She wasn’t used to English rations, and since on the other hand she knew all there was to know about sex, the bully beef and canned peas this time offered her new sensual pleasures to explore.
Later, Gaston found him sitting bare-assed in Bertie’s remaining car, listening to the headset he’d taken from the patrol leader. Gaston joined him, oiled, naked, and looking a little bushed. As Gaston literally slid into the leather seat beside him, he asked what he was listening to.
Captain Gringo said, “Dots and dashes. Sounds like International Morse. But they must be transmitting in German. I haven’t any idea what. Here, see if you can make it out.”
Gaston pressed an earphone to his head, listened awhile, and said, “It’s German. But in code. ‘My mother’s hound says the cabbage is lavender’ can’t mean anything but a code. It’s not a cypher. The triple-thumbed species of ham-handed pig-shit eater is using senseless but whole words. To decode it, one would need the code book. I don’t suppose you looked for any?”
“I did. I didn’t find it. Besides, I don’t think Bertie was a German. Just a hungry Englishman. They’re probably sending to a patrol they put out to survey the damage back where they shelled us. We ought to be okay here for a while. By the way, it’s not pig shit they eat. Germans eat pigs’ feet, Gaston.”
“That, too. Don’t tell me they don’t eat shit. You were not there in 1870. The German who is not eating your shit is shitting in your face. They have very predictable habits.”
“I didn’t know you fought in the Franco-Prussian war, Gaston. I thought after you deserted the Legion in Mexico, back in the late sixties—”
“Haven’t you ever heard of a boat? I don’t boast of my service at Sedan. The idiot we had for a leader surrendered. I found it trés fatigue in that Prussian prison camp, so of course I went back to Mexico, where one has some chance of predicting the outcome when one signs up to fight. Merde alors, the government France had, then, got a lot of poor peasant boys killed while the officers drank and fornicated miles from the front. The next war France has with the Boche will be different.”
“I hope you’re right. Wars keep getting messier as this century winds down. Nobody had machine guns or long-range artillery in our Civil War, yet it was bloody enough. Hate to think what an officer like Burnside or even Grant would do with green troops ordered into a bayonet charge against modern weapons.”
“Oui, this radio business seems a disturbing complication, too. In the good old days one had to consider only the species of enemy out in front of one’s positions. Now, even if you seem to be winning, you must worry about the sons of the bitch calling for assistance by wireless! Listen, Dick, do you think we could send amusing messages to the Boche with the transmitter in this vehicle? It might be trés amuse, non?”
“Yeah, and it would tell them we’re still alive and still within transmitting range, too! I think there’s a way to pin down the location of a transmitter, too. I don’t think we’d better wire that the Kaiser is a shit-for-brains just yet. Let them figure it out for themselves.”
Later, near noon, the Indian youths he’d sent out to scout returned. Decepciona brought them to Captain Gringo and Gaston and translated as they drew a map in the red clay for them.
It was a pretty good map, considering that they were supposed to be stupid savages. Their outline of the huge lagoon matched the one on paper pretty well, and he knew they couldn’t just have completed a circuit of the fifty-mile body of water. He knew they had a lot of it in their heads, since it was their country, after all.
The Indians verified that there was a gun emplacement out on the south point forming an almost shut entrance to the lagoon. The main camp was nowhere near the old pirate camp. Wallace had been bullshitting.
The scouts put it at the base of the south peninsula hemming in the lagoon. Captain Gringo nodded and told Gaston, “Makes sense. From that position they have an inland anchorage to their west and a view of the open sea to their east. They probably like to watch the boats go by. Decepciona, ask if they saw any vessels at anchor in the lagoon. Big boats. Gray. Maybe little cigar-shaped boats with a tower in the middle of a long deck?”
Decepciona did. They said the harbor was empty. He nodded and told Gaston, “It’s a supply dump, then. They must not plan a war this season. The idea is to set up a supply-and-communications base near the Panama Canal, for later.”
“Eh bien, that means later indeed, Dick. The canal is not half-completed yet. It may never be, thanks to the confused politics down that way.”
“It will be. If Colombia won’t be sensible about it, sooner or later Uncle Sam or Queen Vickie figures to just grab the canal zone. That canal’s too vital to anyone with a two-ocean navy to let the pig-headed Colombian junta hold things up much longer.”
Gaston shrugged as he stared down morosely at the scratched out diagram and said, “To hell with the coming century. Let’s live through the rest of this one! Our Boche friends have done a nice job, for eaters of pig shit. Regard how they are dug in with the sea protecting them on three sides. To winkle them out would take a trés desperate charge by a lot of trés suicidal troops against that one narrow front they have to worry about.”
Captain Gringo got Decepciona to ask the scouts about the landward approaches up the narrow peninsula. She did, and told them, “They were afraid to go very close. Mangroves and other trees grow on that spit of land, all the way out to the tip, except where the bad blancos have cleared in places. They have piled bags filled with something in a waist-high wall across the peninsula from water’s edge to water’s edge. But the ends are hidden by piled brush. Between the wall of bags and the land, they have dug a ditch and they have some of that nasty wire the Spanish use to fence in banana plantations lately. Our boys of course slip through the sharp wire easily. But these warriors say the bad blancos have strung it very thickly, in more than one line.”
Captain Gringo grunted and said, “That’s a neat one I’ve heard before. Firing line of sandbags, guarded by a dry moat and barbed wire. Did you ever get the feeling you weren’t welcome somewhere, Gaston?”
“Bah, given a brigade of my old Legion and an hour or so’s barrage to soften them up, I could get through. The two of us and a dozen unwashed archers is another matter, however!”
“Yeah, when you’re right you’re right. There has to be a better way.”
He checked the Indian’s outline against his more accurate navigational chart and said, “Okay, that battery of eight-inchers is out on the point, a good ten miles or more from the main base across the south end of the peninsula. They might have a wire strung to talk to mother. But how fast can anyone run ten miles?”
Gaston said, “Too fast, if you mean to spend muc
h time out on the tip of that adorable spit. But are we not forgetting that to get out to the end of the peninsula, one must first go through the defenses at the base?”
“I wish you wouldn’t be such a party pooper. Wallace said there was a gun emplacement on both sides of the lagoon entrance. On the other hand, Wallace screwed his friends’ wives, then screwed his friends. Decepciona, ask them if there could be more big guns on the north point.”
Decepciona did. They said they didn’t know. Gaston said the question about the north point was academic, adding, “To get there, one would have to circle the great lagoon. It would take days.”
Captain Gringo said, “No, it wouldn’t. That’s what the wheel was invented for. It may call for some heavy machete work. But the terrain is flat and if we started now we’d get there just before dawn.”
Gaston rolled his eyes heavenward and said, “Then what, you maniac? Even if one assumes the north point is not guarded, the south point lies across at least two miles of water, and we know they have big guns dug in!”
Captain Gringo didn’t answer. He was thinking. He had watched the Indians long enough to know who was good with a machete. They’d have to leave most of the men to look after the women and children here. But the tribe could probably spare four guys and Decepciona, if he promised not to lose them. The two scouts here would insist on going. That meant he needed two really husky machete swingers and, yeah, there might be room for one good tom-tom man. When he asked the girl who their best drummer was, Gaston snorted, “Now I know he’s crazy! It’s not enough he wishes to attack a military base the hard way. Now he wants to announce our approach with some species of idiot beating on a goddamn drum!”
*
They stopped just before sunset and Captain Gringo ordered everyone out of the steam car to stretch their legs. Gaston said it was about time. He’d insisted on bringing his “Mimi” along, which only seemed fair. So they’d been a little crowded, with the two naked Indian girls having to take turns riding in Gaston’s lap. Gaston hadn’t minded that part.
As the two female and five male Indians automatically started to build another small town, he told Decepciona to forget it as he opened the car’s repair kit. He found a coil of bailing wire and sent an Indian up a tree with it to tie one end to a branch and drop the rest of the long thin wire down to him. Then as Gaston watched, bemused, Captain Gringo started taking the car apart. Gaston said, “The steamer was running well enough, if one ignores a broken spine. What on earth are you doing?”
Captain Gringo crawled under the chassis with his tools as he explained in a somewhat muffled voice, “Taking out the radio gear. Get a screw driver and start working on the battery mounts up front. Don’t bust any wires, though.” Gaston shrugged and said he had nothing better to do. So in less than a quarter of an hour they had the battery and the transmitter that had been hidden by the dash laid out neatly on the grass, still connected by a confusion of wires. Captain Gringo had left the generator in place under the chassis after merely disconnecting it.
He told Decepciona to bring the tribal drummer over, and as she did so he explained to Gaston, “We’re out of artillery range now. Hopefully we’re still close enough to the base for them to pick up an S.O.S.”
“We wish to call on Germany for help, Dick?”
“Not exactly. They’ll assume we’ve discovered the Marconi stuff and that we’re yelling for help to the world in general. If they range on the direction of the signals, they’ll assume we’re stuck here. The guys who deserted us will have told them we were low on kerosene. We’ve made hash out of two of their patrols. So they won’t order them to head for this spot after dark. But our tom-tom guy had better move his ass before the sun comes up again.”
Decepciona brought the drummer over and translated as Captain Gringo told the frowning Indian what he wanted him to do. The Indian said he could surely keep tapping the funny little key in the same rhythm of three dots and three dashes from time to time through the night, with time off to pee or jerk off. But he didn’t see why.
Captain Gringo told his pretty translatress, “Tell him it’s big medicine to fool the spirits of the bad blancos. We’ll leave him here with plenty of food and water. At first light he must stop and head back to the others at your new camp. Tell him to swing wide. Bad men may be coming this way.”
She did, and the drummer agreed to the plan, even if he didn’t understand it. A few minutes later they were steaming on through the jungle.
Gaston nodded and said, “Oui, it ought to work. If they pinpoint us on the map back there, they will not expect us to turn up anywhere else. Naturally, they will assume the others are still with us and that both cars have run out of fuel, non?”
“Right. If one car was still rolling, the bunch of us could have driven on in the survivor, crowded or not. The ruse gives Sylvia and the others an added margin of safety, too. There’s no sense radioing possible pals in Patuca to watch for ’em if they don’t think any of us made it halfway there!”
“I don’t mind riding crowded,” said Gaston, grinning as he leaned back to close his eyes while Mimi bounced on his lap more than the slow rolling really called for. Captain Gringo chuckled and asked, “Have you got your dong in that dame, you old goat?”
“Where else would I have it? You asked me not to do it to your girl anymore.”
“Okay, but try not to overdo it. We need to save our strength.”
He braked to a stop and consulted his map by the rapidly fading light. Then he nodded and said, “Okay, we’re making good time. If we don’t drive down an alligator’s mouth in the dark, we should make it well before the next time we see daylight.”
They didn’t see any ’gators or much of anything else that night, but it was really rough going. Thanks to steam power, they made it through patches of hub-deep muck that an internal-combustion or electric car would have been stuck in for keeps. The muscular machete men had their work cut out for them as from time to time they had to hack a quarter mile or more through tangled vegetation.
By 4:00 a.m. Captain Gringo had emptied the last reserves of citronella oil into the main fuel tank and couldn’t come up with an answer when Gaston asked how in hell they were going to drive back the other way. Gaston bitched, “Merde, I foresee a long weary walk to Patuca, if we live that long.”
They had to be near the tip of the peninsula they’d driven out on by now. So Captain Gringo sent his two scouts ahead as he turned down the oil fire to conserve fuel. Decepciona suggested a walk in the woods while they waited. He told her not to talk dirty as he got to work mounting the machine gun on the hood with the action hanging back over the dash so that he could man both the steering wheel and the trigger from his seat. He put the last extra ammo canisters on the floorboards between the two front seats and wedged them good with whittled wooden stakes.
Then there was nothing to do but wait. A million years later the two scouts came back, grinning like naughty boys. Decepciona said, “They say there was a small how you say outpost out on the tip of this point. Two bad blancos were there with a spy glass and a tom-tom-tom gun like this one.”
“Bueno. Did the Germans see them?”
“No. They saw the German persons first. They put arrows in them and cut off their heads.”
One of the archers held up something dark and dripping in the dim light. Captain Gringo whistled softly and said, “Remind me never to shell a Mosquito village. Okay, that doesn’t give us much time. They’ll probably be rowing across to change the guard at the outpost as soon as it’s light. Get everybody back in, Decepciona. We have to get out of there poco tiempo.”
As he turned up the fire and opened the throttle, Gaston asked, “Is there any point to driving farther, Dick? She just told you they took out the outpost.”
“I heard her. We have to get across the straits of the lagoon before it’s too light.”
“In a steam car? You can’t ford two or more miles of salt water on wheels, dammit! The passage is deep enoug
h for oceangoing vessels to enter!”
“Yeah, small ones, anyway. They’re probably figuring on submersibles when the big one starts in a decade or so.”
He saw a break in the trees ahead. He stopped a moment to tell his girl to put the machete men to work, adding that he wanted balsa logs if possible.
Gaston bitched, but couldn’t help grinning wolfishly as he said, “I don’t know why I listen to this foolish child, mon Dieu. Who ever heard of attacking a dug-in gun battery with a balsa raft!”
Captain Gringo said, “Nobody. That’s why they shouldn’t be expecting it. They think they have an outpost on this side. Will you take your dong out of Mimi and help, Goddamn it?”
A little over an hour later, as the sky began to pearl pinkly above the eastern sea horizon, a German marine sentry noticed a dark smudge out on the closer waters of the lagoon entrance. He couldn’t make out what it was. It was probably another drifting mat of vegetation drifting out to sea with the tide. But a good German wasn’t paid to think for himself. His standing orders were to report all unusual occurrences on or near his post to the corporal of the guard. So he walked south beyond the two big eight-inch Howitzers and ducked into the noncom’s sandbagged tent to wake his superior. The corporal of the guard had been enjoying a wet dream and sat up with a groan and a curse, growling, “Was zum Teufel – what is it, Dorfler?”
“There is something out on the water, Herr Korporal. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Herr Gott! It’s still dark out and I was about to come in that big blonde! Has the outpost across the strait phoned anything in?”
“Nein. But it could be a native raft putting out to sea from somewhere else, Herr Korporal.”
“Heading for the open sea? Gross Gott let me go back to sleep, you idiot.”
