The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  Kramer lit the cigar. ‘My friend says that there is an Englishman at the heart of a rebellion. The good colonel says that an Englishman, young enough, Special Forces type, is running their show. The good man says the fat cats at estado mayor have yet to wake up. You saw him . . .’

  The pain beat in his head. ‘I saw a guy.’

  He had drunk the whisky to drive himself to a torpor sleep, because that was the only sleep that could shut out, kill, the nightmare of a falling helicopter, ground impact, spreading fire, and the panic rush to break clear of the heat. It was the nightmare that had been hidden from the psychologists of the DEA. Without the whisky the nightmare would have burned him . . .

  ‘English?’

  Anger. ‘I was flying a bird. I was taking hits. I wasn’t asking a guy a hundred feet below for his fucking passport . . .’

  ‘Could he have been English?’

  ‘Christ, I wasn’t hanging out of the hatch and gawping – he was Caucasian. Listen. He was in control. He had the flame thrower. The flame thrower would have been their top weapon. They’d done the hurt with the flame thrower. I’d never seen before what a flame thrower did . . .’

  Kramer was the caged animal, tracing a track across the thin carpet. ‘And he could have been English?’

  ‘Did you wake me just to ask . . . ?’

  ‘I woke you to see if you would confirm that an Englishman is running a rebellion, because if he is, don’t doubt it, the wires are going to start singing.’

  ‘What the hell would he be here for?’

  ‘Be coming to Guatemala City, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t be shoot and scoot. Would be coming the whole way, trying to . . .’

  ‘And that’s not a lot to do with me.’

  ‘Good night.’

  The cigar smoke hung under his ceiling. He opened the window. The rain slashed into his room.

  Still dark when they started out. Still the beat of the rain as the column went forward.

  He knew that Jorge had sat the whole night at the head of his mother’s grave.

  He needed a week. It must rain for a week. On the folded and frayed map they were sixty-one land miles from the outer edge of Guatemala City. He needed the cloud cover and the rain for the days and nights of a week.

  10

  The rumour slithered in the high country of the Cuchumatanes mountains, a snake on its belly.

  The rumour was heard in the villages of the Ixil triangle, the communities that were bounded by the towns of Nebaj and Cotzal and Chajul, and it was heard further north up the mud and stone track that reached to Sotzil and Ilom and Sajsivan. The rumour was carried by men who had gone through the night along trails that were streams of rainwater. The rumour was carried to the village and to the Pole Developments that were under the watch of the army and to the loggers in the forest and to the road repair gangs that huddled in huts and waited for the weather to change. The rumour would reach a village house and then fan out in secrecy, taken by whisper, avoiding the homes of those who collaborated. Before the dawn, in the villages of the triangle, men gathered together in the homes of the elders. Vee was in a village, and Zed in another, and Eff gathered around him a road gang. Soldiers slept, the men of the Civil Patrols manned their blocks in ignorance. The message that had been carried from the village of Acul demanded that men who would join the march should move out before first light.

  The rumour spoke of fire.

  A growing column on the move.

  The column headed south and west, going slow, towards the garrison town of Nebaj.

  ‘I am a professor of mathematics,’ the Academic told Gord. ‘I deal with a world that is logical, quite predictable. There is no room in the world of my study for the possible or the probable . . . Will we get to Guatemala City?’

  ‘If I have the weather.’

  ‘I was a fireman in the city.’ Broken English quietly spoken, and the sloshing in mud of the heavy boots. ‘I have no knowledge of the army. Can we win?’

  ‘If the weather stays with us.’

  They were masked by the low mist, climbing and then sliding in chaos into the steepness of the valleys. Harder for Gord because the numbers were increasing and the control that he demanded was slipping, and the breaks for rest were down now to five minutes in each hour. They stayed in the tree lines, away from the roads and tracks. Each time the march stopped, each time the rain fell sheer on his face and his shoulders, each time he peered into the blanket of the mist, he heaved a great sigh of relief. While the rain fell then the mud roads would slip and the heavy transport of the army would be blocked. While the mist cloaked them then the fixed-wing bombers of the army with high explosive and napalm and the helicopters with rockets and machine guns could not fly to find them. Driving the march forward . . .

  A flash signal. Sent in code. Given priority designation.

  Kramer alternated between his sandwich and his cigar and his Coca Cola. He watched the signal go, rolling on transmission. He grinned, a little wickedness, because he anticipated the bluster and the argument that his signal would achieve, and the hastily gathered meetings, and the summoning up of Guatemala detail, and the scratching of appointments. The signal was beamed from the roof aerials of the embassy to the Agency’s regional headquarters in Panama City, then relayed to the antennae farm serving Langley beyond the beltway of Washington, DC.

  Good and choice . . .

  The Archaeologist saw it all. It happened within his earshot, not twenty yards ahead of him.

  They were more than two hundred men and the column stretched ahead into the trees so that he could not see Jorge who was the front-marker and it coiled away behind him so that when he turned he could not see the back-marker.

  The cart wheels were playing in his mind, angering him. All the time that he pushed, shoved, dragged the awkwardness of the cart, the noise of the wheels scraped in him. They were on a track that might have been used by farm workers going to distant fields from a village, narrow and hardly beaten down now that the maize harvest had been cut and collected. He thought that the wheels of the cart owned a personal bloody-mindedness, difficult to shift over each raised stone or protruding root.

  Gord came past him again, chivvying at the column, and he took a turn at the weight of the cart and there was his brusque smile, and he was going forward again. They came round the corner of the trail and the nozzles and tubes of the cart smacked into the back of Gord’s legs. Going to apologize, and the cry again . . . The apology stayed in the Archaeologist’s throat.

  It was a bundle of rags.

  It was in the middle of the trail. The big man was over the rag bundle and his boot scythed at it, kicked it. It was the big man, the bald head, who had shot the prisoner back on the Sayaxché to Chinajá road. It was the big man who had directed the machine-gun fire that had cut down the gate sentries at Playa Grande. The big man with the stubble beard kicked with ferocity and the bundle shrieked. The Archaeologist saw what Gord would have seen. He saw the face amongst the rags, frightened and defiant, and he saw the silver light flash of the knife blade . . .

  ‘What’s your problem?’ Gord’s gravel voice.

  ‘He’s scum.’

  ‘What’s your problem with that kid?’

  The big man kicked again, fast, and the knife’s slash was too slow to cut the leg. ‘He’s a thief.’

  ‘What’s with a thief ?’

  ‘I don’t want scum . . .’

  The big man had the rag bundle boy pinioned now on the ground and the barrel of his rifle pressed against the chest of the child.

  ‘Leave him.’

  The march was stopped. A circle of men gathered around Gord Brown and the big man and the rag bundle child. The Archaeologist saw the nerve flicker in the eyes of the big man.

  Bombast. ‘We don’t want thieving scum, we don’t want this . . .’ He went to kick the rag bundle where it was pinioned by the rifle. It was the show of the big man’s independence of Gord Brown. The boot swung. Gord going so quickly, a
blur of movement, and the catching of the big man off balance, and the toppling of him. So fast. The big man on his back, and Gord walking away from him, like he had no more interest, and the child scampering after him. The march starting again . . . The Archaeologist saw the wallet that lay beside the pressed ground where the rag bundle child had been pinioned. It was a tourist’s wallet. It was the kind of large wallet that his father would have owned back in Garden City. It was a wallet for credit cards and cash and traveller’s cheques. Each volunteer who came to join the march was searched before he was allowed to go forward.

  Did it matter that the kid thieved tourists’ wallets?

  The Archaeologist tugged at the cart wheels to get them moving again.

  The Archaeologist stumbled on, striving to match the new urgency. Ahead of him the big man walked sullenly alone, and further ahead of him Gord Brown marched under the weight of the backpack and the machine gun and the swathes of ammunition with the Street Boy dogging his heels. Gord needed a week of rain and ground-level cloud. It was the first day of Gord’s week. They were manhandling the cart across the torrent of a small river. The wheels cleared the underwater rocks, then were stuck again. Gord was on the far side of the river bank, and he seemed to clutch at the collar of the Street Boy and throw him easily into the torrent’s heart and the Street Boy ducked in the water and then surfaced and had a hold of the cart and was dragging it with them. The Archaeologist saw the excitement of the Street Boy, and the sharp pleasure grin of Gord Brown, and he saw the bitter anger stare of the big man. He wondered if they could hold together for a week . . .

  By the end of the day they looked down onto the town of Nebaj.

  The government’s inspectors were in. They had taken the far end of the open-plan area of the office space, and they had required a wall safe to be cleared and then they had made it their own with a changed digit code on the lock. Three desks were available to them, and they worked there with their laptops and their calculators and the files they had demanded. They were at the desks within two hours of the Houston flight smacking the tarmac at La Aurora. They accepted nothing, made their own coffee, hiked down to the dining area for their own open sandwiches, had booked into a hotel on their way from the airport to the embassy. A woman led the inspectorate team in a navy two-piece that would have been smart if it hadn’t creased in the cramped airline seat, and there were two men who crawled to her. The work of the DEA, Guatemala City, was on hold. It was the way when government inspectors called in at a field station. They could be called forward at any time, Tom or the Intelligence Analyst or the Chemist or the Treasurer . . . Hell, and why not, Tom Schultz thought, because there was no way that a war against drugs importation into the United States great and beloved of America should take priority over the crime of lost paperclips. He’d slept well, and the bottle of Glenlivet malt was dead in the rubbish can of his room, and by sleeping well he had sidetracked the nightmare of a downed bird falling with fire. They were squashed into customs territory, pushed off their own ground. He shared a table with the Liaison major who smoked sweet tobacco in his briar.

  He turned sheets of paper, a blur to him, because he thought of a man he had seen, a hundred feet below a banking Huey, a man crouched at a cart that carried a flame thrower . . . He picked at the scar.

  ‘You should leave it . . . Sorry, what the hell’s it to do with me?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  The major bored on. ‘Was that in the Gulf, Desert Storm, I heard you were there?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I heard you were downed . . .’

  ‘Right, too.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  He pushed the paper away, wished the major would wrap. ‘Over a shit piece of sand.’

  ‘I’d have given an arm to be there. I was at Bragg right through it, hell of a disappointment. Behind our lines or their lines?’

  ‘Their lines.’

  ‘You must have been in some state, that hole in you . . . Christ, you feel bad when you miss something like that. Don’t suppose you could walk out. Rescued . . . ?’

  ‘Right again.’

  ‘That must be quite a thing. I mean, to be rescued from behind their lines. Special Forces, those guys are real heroes. Quite a thing to owe your life to a man, group of men. Get up each morning, crap and wash and dress, and know that some place there’s a guy who’s the reason you’re still with us. Do you get to see him?’

  Flatly said, ‘No.’

  ‘But you write . . . ?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Heh, if I owed my life to a man I reckon I’d want to know how he was going.’

  Tom said quietly, ‘I don’t see him, I don’t write to him. I don’t like to owe any man anything. You don’t rate when you’re downed. It’s not exactly the accolade of success. It’s not just bad luck, you know, it’s because of a mistake. The mistake cost a life and a machine, and I don’t care to be reminded of it. So, I don’t go visiting and I don’t sit writing chat letters . . . Subject matter closed.’

  Three meetings scratched.

  ‘What the fuck do the Brits think they’re playing with . . . ?’

  Guatemala printouts called up from the computers.

  ‘Isn’t that place an island of stability . . . ?’

  A gathering of an assistant under secretary and a grade 3 staffer with responsibility for Central America and two at grade 5 who specialized in the affairs of that country.

  ‘Imagine the chaos if that place went down . . .’

  Coffee on the table, and the grade 3 staffer breaking rules and smoking, fourth cigarette, and the large map spread wide.

  ‘The British have no right to be interfering . . .’ the older grade 5 man said.

  ‘Intolerable, the end game could be a disaster for the region . . .’ the younger grade 5 woman said.

  ‘Playing the goddamn end of empire game again, like the tune’s stuck on the needle, like they’re still in goddamn vinyl . . .’ the grade 3 staffer said.

  ‘Let them know they’re off field. Don’t take crap from them. Who is this jerk? How does he get rubbed? Kick their asses in London . . .’ the Assistant Under Secretary said.

  The signal was drafted.

  When the dusk came, when the hammering rain shone against the light of the high perimeter lamps, the boy was moving closer to the sentry on his raised platform. The boy played with stones, piling them, moving on and finding more, making new piles. A tin roof over the platform gave some shelter to the sentry, but there were no sides.

  The town of Nebaj was 6000 feet above sea level, and the figures would have meant nothing to the sentry who had not learned to read nor to write, but he understood the cold and the loneliness that was sentry duty on a platform above the perimeter wire round the Nebaj army camp. All of the duty of sentries had been told by their sergeant to be watchful. There had been a battle, he had heard, at Playa Grande, but that was two, three days’ walk away, or many hours in the bus. He could see only to the rim of the light thrown by the high lamps, and caught in the light, moving casually nearer to him, was the boy, and each time he stopped so the boy found his amusement with the stones, making the small piles. Beside the platform, which was sited to guard it, was a gate. The gate was higher than the razor fence, a wooden frame with barbed wire slung across it. The gate was an entry point to the back of the camp, set between the coils of the perimeter razor wire. The sentry stamped his feet, shivered. His boots bucked the plank platform and rocked his machine gun that rested on a bipod with a belt loaded and readied for use. The sentry heard the new sound, strange. It was beyond the rain wall and the darkness wall and the cloud wall into which he peered. The boy was calling to him, soft but excited. The boy was away from the stones that he had piled and was close to the front spindle legs on which the platform stood. Beyond the rain and the cloud and the darkness was the squealing sound, not that of a young pig but that of metal on metal. It was what the boy had seemed to pick from the ground in front of the platfor
m. What the boy held up shone brightly. It seemed to the sentry to be a ring. He crouched on his platform. The boy was reaching up to him and offering him the ring. His arm was out. The sentry’s fingers touched the bone hand of the boy. There was the squealing sound of the wheels, brought by the wind. He looked up, sharp. He saw the shadow movement where the light and dark merged. And the hand had hold of his wrist and pitched him forward, off the platform. The sentry hit the ground and the blade of the knife flashed in his face.

  They were in four groups.

  Golf and Oscar and Roger and Delta, Jorge’s thin joke . . . Golf was the flame-thrower cart and the mortars. Oscar was the machine gun and the rockets for the main gate of the camp. Roger was for the police barracks in the town. Delta was for the plaza in front of the church and the market.

  Gord led Golf. Harpo led Oscar. Zeppo led Roger. Jorge led Delta.

  The scream of the cart’s wheels going over the cleared ground, Gord and the Fireman and the Academic dragging it. Belting forward in the stampede, and Gord saw the stone piles as he had wanted them. Groucho, with guerrillas and men from Playa Grande and Acul village, waved by Gord to the stones and setting the mortars. What he had told the Street Boy who was scum and a thief, and brilliant, was to line the stones as he played so that one line directed a flight path for the mortar bombs to the administrative block, and another to the biggest dormitory building of the camp. Charging on past Groucho and rushing the wired gate.

  They were halfway across the flooded football pitch, the cart’s wheels gouging the track, and the Archaeologist panting behind with the wheelbarrow, and the mortars were in the air.

  The first mortar explosion, short of the command building, was the signal. The machine-gun fire of Oscar group at the main gate . . . the muffled shooting of Roger group and Delta group away in the streets of Nebaj. Tracer in the air. He was in the shadow of the latrine building. It was as he had argued it through. It was the way he had told them that it would be.