The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  There were squall storms blowing in from the south-west, and the meteorological forecast had determined the fast departure from the airfield east of Havana. It was assumed that any flight plan received by radio in Honduras or Nicaragua or Costa Rica or Guatemala would be monitored by Southern Command at the Quarry Heights base camp in Panama and fed on to the Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs teams in the Central America region.

  The storms would kill the ability of the radar screen slung across the Caribbean by the DEA and Customs agencies to identify the two aircraft. In silence and darkness, the two aircraft designated as Echo Foxtrot and Whisky Alpha flew at their maximum cruising speed of 120 land miles an hour. Set against them, to be avoided, were fixed land-based radar installations, the airborne radar of the E-3 AWAC system mounted in the fuselages of the Boeing 707s, and the aerostat balloon-floated radars. All were vulnerable to poor weather. The airspace of the Caribbean was under continual surveillance as part of the billion-dollar programme to track and interdict narco-trafficking aircraft making the fast run from Colombia and north to the transshipment points.

  They were the old workhorses of the Cuban air force. They were the miracle of maintenance care and the inventiveness of the ground technicians who scavenged and cannibalized and improvised now that the spare parts from the Soviet Union and Poland had to be paid for with cash currency. Two old aircraft, flown by two pairs of old cockpit crewmen whose careers had long ago become stagnant, wheezing and coughing and lurching across the sea space of the Caribbean waters.

  They had left behind them the dull lights of the Isla de la Juventud, crossed the line of twenty-one degrees latitude, headed out over the Yucatan Basin where the depth of the water below them was in excess of 4000 metres. They took a course to the west of the British-administered Grand Cayman, too far distant for the lights of Georgetown to be seen by the navigators, and then on above the Cayman Trench. The aircraft flew over the line of eighty-four degrees longitude, and again the navigators’ fingers, illuminated by their pencil torch beams, pointed to the pilots the crossing of eighteen degrees latitude. They would turn west again close to the empty pimples in the sea mass that were the Swan Islands. The fuel situation would be desperate. Each pilot relied totally on the skill of his navigator.

  The aircraft were Antonovs. They were the An-2 Colt design. Whisky Alpha had been delivered to Cuba, new from the production line in the Soviet Union, in 1961. Echo Foxtrot had come four years later. They were what could be spared. They were what would not be missed if the fuel gauges ran too low, if bad weather forced them down. There was no friendly landfall for them to divert to. Hammering on through the darkness hours towards the coast strip of the Central American isthmus that they would hit at the first dirt smear of dawn lit the horizon behind them . . . They were biplanes. They were each powered by a single 1000-horsepower Shvetsov 62-R nine-cylinder radial engine. There was no margin of error available to the pilots of Whisky Alpha and Echo Foxtrot. They were laden to the maximum, and beyond, because the pilots had shrugged their agreement, with men and war materials and with the cans of fuel for the flight home.

  It was a late throw of defiance from a slipping regime. Back in the past, secure under the umbrella protection of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the regime had supported the fighters of Nicaragua and El Salvador and Guatemala, Argentina and Chile and Peru, supplied them with the courage of the Party’s creed and the firepower held in the island’s arsenals. No longer. It was a late throw.

  A bad night for flying low over water, but a bad night was protection against the radar.

  In an hour they would skim the coastline of Honduras, near to Puerto Cortés, then go north over the frontier of Guatemala, then start to search for the map co-ordinates of the landing strip . . . if the fuel gauges could be believed . . .

  Beside Gord, Vee was sick.

  He was sick through fear and because he had drunk too much between the time that the loading had been completed and the time of take-off.

  Across the fuselage from Gord, Zed sat strapped in by the webbing harness and shivered in terror.

  Further down the fuselage, opposite each other, Zeppo and Harpo gasped continuously on their cigarettes, ignored the No Smoking signs above their heads. Between their legs were ammunition boxes. They lit one cigarette from the end of another and stamped the butts out on the metal floor space between the ammunition boxes. The petrol cans that the aircraft carried were stowed aft in the fuselage but too damned close, thought Gord, for the chain of cigarettes.

  Eff tried to wipe the vomit off Gord’s legs.

  No point, give it a rest, more to come.

  When the wind took the aircraft, either battering against the fuselage or buffeting into the cockpit, then the Antonov pitched, and there had been the dead moments when it had seemed they were in freefall, and the moments when it had seemed they were lifted and tossed up and then left to drop. The flight was the worst he’d known because he was alone. Bloody, going into western Iraq in the big Puma, through a sandstorm that was great for cover, but he’d had guys with him who were his own, and the pilot then hadn’t been drinking, not like the jerk who was flying them now. They’d all been drinking after the loading had been completed, they’d all hit the rum mixed with not enough orange juice before the take-off. As far as Gord could see, the other pilot had drunk more. He wondered how they were doing, the other two passengers who were in Whisky Alpha, whom he hadn’t met before, who had seemed better news than Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho . . . Gord had done his calculations, knew they were at the bottom of the fuel capacity for the flight, and had the sight of the fuel cans being loaded in his mind. Bloody well on the edge. He could make out the shape of Groucho from Zeppo’s and Harpo’s cigarettes, and he saw that Groucho held his head in his hands, as if covering his eyes in the darkness would make the battering more bearable.

  Gord thought, couldn’t be certain in the black interior, that Jorge was asleep.

  Gord thought, couldn’t be certain through the rattled stress on the spars and wings, that he had heard Jorge snore.

  He had talked to the pilot before take-off, and the Cuban had American English. Gord had rather liked the droll humour of the man. He would have appreciated the humour the more now. The pilot had told a Fidel story, a good one . . . One question each for Clinton and Yeltsin and Fidel to Jesus. How will the inner-city anti-narcotics programme go? – Fine, but Clinton wouldn’t see the results in his lifetime. How will the campaign for a market-led economy go? – Fine, but Yeltsin wouldn’t see the results in his lifetime. Fidel asked, ‘What about my campaign against inefficiency and corruption?’ – Jesus said, ‘It’ll do fine, but you won’t see the results in your lifetime, and I won’t see them in my lifetime either.’

  Well, the pilot had the weather report. The pilot had kept the weather report to himself. Cracking jokes about the leader was the least of the pilot’s problems. Sitting in the fuselage, bouncing in the seat, feeling the harness straps bite at his shoulders, Gord understood why the pilot had been at the rum and orange, why he’d poured half a bottle down to the last drip into an old silver-plated hip flask.

  Gord held tight as he could onto the pulling arms of the cart that was sandwiched between himself and Zed. It had broken clear of his grip once, half an hour back in a roller coaster rise, hammered into Harpo’s knee . . . And Vee was gone from beside him, lifted clear, and was falling into the cart’s arms, and was whimpering.

  ‘Well, my friend . . .’ Jorge’s calm voice above the bleat of the engine. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Time I made an excuse and left . . .’

  ‘Was it real, when you said you would quit?’

  ‘At the time it seemed the right thing to say . . .’

  They dropped. Gord clung to the cart handles. Groucho cried out in his fear.

  The hiss of the question in his ear. ‘Why did you come, why did you leave your home?’

  The Antonov bounced and there was the surge of the engine p
ower.

  ‘Past caring, history . . .’

  ‘Why?’

  Gord shouted, ‘Because I was asked. Because no-one else was asking me. Because you get so as you want to be asked.’

  ‘That’s a stupid answer.’

  ‘Not the cleverest question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I answer your question, then you answer my question.’

  A chuckle. ‘Agreed.’

  Gord said, ‘I was down in the Gulf, long-range penetration of Iraqi territory, reconnaissance stuff. The cease-fire came. It was the time the Americans were urging the Shia minority to revolt against the Sunni Moslem Baghdad regime. I was commanding a team of six and we’d ended up close to a town called Karbala. We were working with the people there, trying to get them organized, how to defend themselves. The cease-fire had left too much of the Iraqi armour intact. They’d lost their bloody nerve, the politicians, called the stop too early. Christ, and they needed help, the Shia people in Karbala. We were doing what we could for them, and we were ordered out. I had a bloody colonel yelling down the radio at me. I should have told him to go fuck himself . . . We walked out. I obeyed orders. No, I don’t know what we would have achieved if we had stayed longer, but I know that after we’d gone and the tanks came, the Shias in Karbala were minced. Our bloody politicians had led these people on, then bottled out. We had a responsibility for them . . . Answer, like a bloody fool I was looking again for a small guy to stand beside . . . Question, what’s the end line here?’

  The engine missed. Shit. The moment’s silence. Shit. The engine caught again. The sweat streaming on his forehead.

  They climbed again and there was the beat of rain on the porthole window behind Gord’s head.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It was a crap answer.’

  ‘An idiot question . . . Your answer. The end line is to win.’

  Gord talking fast. ‘Right, right, how far? We hit a village? We shoot up a barracks? We let them know we’re around? What, a week, then out?’

  ‘To win, Mr Brown, we must go to Guatemala City. We are going to turn them out of the Palacio Nacional. That is what I mean by winning . . .’

  ‘And it was a crap question.’

  There was just him and Jorge who slapped at his shoulder in amusement, and there was Eff and Vee and Zed, and there was Harpo and Zeppo and Groucho, and there were two men aboard Whisky Alpha . . . Why not?

  ‘We are going to win.’

  FROM: Fort William police HQ, Lochaber District.

  TO: Strathclyde police HQ, Glasgow.

  REF: A/0800/79y/4.

  ATTENTION: Special Branch.

  Local report that 3 (three) native Indian Guatemalans, giving Havana/Cuba residence, visited Loch Ailort area last week to seek out Gordon Benjamin BROWN, No Permanent Address.

  He understood to be former Special Air Service commissioned officer, no further detail, currently working as fish farm labourer.

  Believed BROWN propositioned to provide military help for proposed invasion of Guatemala (exclaimer). No offence committed in our force area. You may wish to up follow.

  End.

  Gord had gone forward.

  It was smooth flying now. Between them, Eff and Vee and Zed could mind the cart.

  He stood, but bowed and hunched, at the back of the cockpit area and braced himself against the backs of the pilot’s and navigator’s seats.

  They didn’t seem to mind him being there. Perhaps they recognized a military man. Perhaps they were both just so damned thankful to be out of the storm belt. The navigator had the flight chart spread on his knee, and sometimes his finger pointed to a position, the crossing of the Honduran coast, the crossing of the Guatemalan frontier. They had flown west of Puerto Cortés, then south of the Guatemalan city of Puerto Barrios. He could see the land mass beneath them, dark with the first sheen of grey settling on their horizon. Dawn coming and fast. There was broken cloud above them. They had lost the protection of the darkness and the bad weather. Twice the pilot pointed to the fuel gauge where the needle had settled at the top of the red-coloured segment. Gord understood that they had to make the wide detour of Belize airspace, because there was modern radar at Belize, and a squadron of Harrier jets on the runway to come up on interception course if they aroused suspicion. They were clear of the threat of the Harriers now because they were over Guatemala.

  He would have admitted it, couldn’t have hidden it, the excitement consumed him. It was the excitement that stretched him and pumped the adrenaline, but private and not shared . . . The landing point was identified on the chart for him. They were low over the water of the Lago de Izabal, perhaps a hundred feet, they would climb immediately on crossing the far shore, over high ground and a National Park, they would cross the road strip that was the principal route from Cobán to the Belize border, and then ahead was only the swamp jungle wilderness, and the airstrip.

  The excitement bulged in him, as it always did when he flew forward to combat. It was why he had come, in truth, to find again the excitement . . . Over the park, a carpet of triple canopy trees, the navigator pointed again to the position of the landing strip and gestured with his hands. Fifteen minutes to the destination. The needle was lower in the red section at the extremity of the fuel gauge. No talking in the cockpit. The light was coming up around them. Gord leaned forward to search the skies, under the cloud fragments, for the second aircraft. He could not see Whisky Alpha. He tapped the pilot’s shoulder, he pointed port and starboard, he gestured – where was Whisky Alpha? Just the shrug of the pilot. They were in radio silence, how the hell would the pilot know, dumb query. A shimmer of sunlight ahead of them. He stared down at the ground, flat and endless to a misted horizon. The first sunlight caught the rich green of the jungle ceiling. They were across the road. The jungle was virgin. An empty quarter of desolation, no mark of man’s hand. No cut trails, no smoke spirals, no habitation clearances. An army could have been hidden here, below Echo Foxtrot, lost and never found.

  And the landing strip was ahead of them.

  He heard the pilot swear.

  So damned short . . . A runway for a light aircraft . . . There was a ribbon cut of lighter green in the darker spread of jungle . . .

  An alarm ringing in the cockpit.

  The needle was stationary at the bottom of the red section of the fuel gauge.

  They came in a half-circle to the north end of the runway. Gord thought it brilliant flying, brilliant navigating. He wondered how it was that a cockpit crew who could fly so well should have ended up on a crap mission with a drying fuel tank, and he remembered the Fidel story – the shit jobs for the livewires, just as he had always known it, the shit jobs for the men who would go home in ‘ignominy’ – and there was a slow smile on his face, and the bloody alarm was clamouring.

  A half-turn and they were going in.

  No recce, no gentle circling to spy the strip. Been past it once and seen nothing of obstacles, craters. No fuel to mess with.

  Coming down onto the uncut grass, might have been a foot high, might have been a yard high. Coming down.

  They hit.

  The shudder of touch-down tore at his arm tendons. Gord was braced. The bounce. Down. The change of the engine pitch, reverse thrust. Swerving, charging, slowing, rushing to the tree line ahead. Slewing, stopping. The tree line edging closer. Stopped. Gord felt the numbness, and his hand rested on the pilot’s shoulder and squeezed his admiration. He heard the applause from behind. All of them clapping their hands. God, and they’d the bloody right to clap. The pilot had his helmet off, and he was tearing away the silk face scarf that he wore like an old Grand Prix driver, and he had the hip flask to his mouth and the rum dribbling from his lips before the navigator snatched it from him.

  Gord dropped down from the side door of the Antonov.

  The warm dawn air was around him, and the butterflies scattered from the grass that reached to his knees.

  There was a small wood-built hut a
t the end of the runway, in the trees, a dozen yards from where Echo Foxtrot had stopped.

  The scramble started. Lifting out the ammunition crates. Passing down the canvas sacks that held the assault rifles. There was a low droning sound from the distance, below the tree level, beyond their vision. Forming a chain to get the petrol cans out of the fuselage. Throwing down the medical box, and the cardboard cartons that held the food, Meals Ready to Eat. Manoeuvring out of the doorway the flame thrower’s cart and the tubes. The droning of Whisky Alpha’s engine closing. The scramble to get the small pile of ammunition and weapons and medicines and food clear of the runway and into the hut, and to push the cart to the door of the hut, and to get the petrol cans to the edge of the runway. They had started to push Echo Foxtrot to the runway’s side, all of them straining together, when the engine sound of Whisky Alpha, the growing roar, was stifled. Just a cough, and gone.

  Gord saw the aircraft. She was low above the trees, rolling as if the pilot was losing his power.

  All of them quiet, all of them watching the silent struggle of Whisky Alpha to reach the landing strip.

  The main impact point, after the tops of trees had sheared away the wings, was fifty yards short of the safety of the runway.

  There was an explosion. Of course there was a fucking explosion. There was fire. Of course there was fucking fire.

  Whisky Alpha crashed with two passengers, and most of the machine guns and most of the belt-fed ammunition, and the rocket launchers and the grenade projectiles, and with most of the AK-47s and half of the ammunition, and the reserve petrol for the flight home.

  Gord watched the flames scorching amongst the trees.

  They started to run the length of the runway.

  The dawn reaching brightly across the skyline of the capital city of the Republic of Guatemala.

  Not an old city. A city without history. The first capital of Guatemala, founded by the Spanish settlers of the Conquest under the direction of Pedro de Alvarado, lies under a carpet of rock and mud thrown down onto its crude buildings by the earthquake of 1541. The country around that capital city that was to comprise the modern Guatemala had been wrested from a civilization of sophistication and achievement by just 120 horsemen and 300 footsoldiers. A second capital was built at Antigua on a site beneath the twin volcano mountains of Fuego and Agua, and was ruined by a flowing lava sea. The third capital was placed in La Ermita valley in the last century, at an altitude of 5000 feet where a Spanish-descended elite could be safe from the cholera and disease they had carried from Europe and which decimated their despised workforce of ethnic Mayan Indians.