A wheel turned . . .
He seemed not to see the trees of the avenues bent in the wind, nor the rain sluicing on his windscreen, nor the huddled street traders, nor the porters sprinting with bags from taxis outside the big hotels, nor the boutiques, nor the restaurants, nor the sodden life of a great city that was his home.
. . . A wheel turned in his mind.
He remembered a fading photograph, much creased, of a man standing with his wife and his small boy child. He had carried the photograph with him into the battle. He had taken the photograph so that if he captured the whore Ramírez then he would know him. The wheel turned because the whore’s child had come back . . . He remembered the men who were driven by the barrels of rifles towards the church. He could scent the fire from a burning church of charred timber frames, and smell the scorched flesh. The wheel turned because a flame thrower had destroyed Playa Grande and Nebaj . . . How many other wheels to turn in a country pocked with unmarked graves . . . ? The route of the plastic orange-headed pins on his wall map led to Guatemala City, no doubts. And his mind showed him the flame thrower and the rabble horde, and the flame thrower and the rabble horde rushed together on the wide tree-lined avenue that was his home.
He told his wife that Nebaj had fallen, that the triangle was beyond control, that she should pack suitcases that night, and in the morning she should fly with their daughter to St Petersburg in Florida.
There would be many others, that morning, officers and administrators and interrogators and politicians, who heard the news from Nebaj and the word that was fire, who felt a fear that vengeance was carried closer.
‘You are intelligent?’ The Archaeologist walked beside her.
‘If you say so.’ Alex bridled.
‘You are a college graduate?’
‘Could have been, didn’t bother with it, I let it go . . .’
She knew, Alex Pitt had been told, that he was a professional academic, that he had a post at the University of Minnesota. He wondered why she seemed to sneer at him, take the opportunity to rubbish what was important to him. He sought to throttle his rising distaste of her.
‘But you are intelligent, if not educated intelligent . . . ?’
‘It’s your privilege to have your opinion.’
‘You have the potential of intelligence, and I apologize for my rudeness, but you behave like a stupid bitch.’
‘Then back your apology by walking somewhere else.’
He saw the flush high on her cheeks. He bored in at her. It was what he thought necessary to say. ‘What you should know as an intelligent person, what you should have realized, is that without Gord this thing has no chance and no hope and no possibility. If you didn’t want to be in the real and the big and the bad world, then you should have gone somewhere else, taken in Greenpeace, or . . .’
She said quietly, and he thought she was chastened, ‘Whales and dolphins didn’t seem as important as people.’
‘You could have worked in a village in Somalia, fed the starving, nice and clear cut . . .’
She tossed her head, threw back the blondeness of her hair. ‘And moaned when the camera crews came visiting, played the heroine. Plenty queuing up to get into that act. I get your message. It seemed, it seemed decently anonymous here. It seemed the right place to be. Contrary to what you think, I do actually believe that non-violence wins . . .’
‘Not in this country.’
‘I believe in non-violence, and I would have thought you would. And I believe this march will cause only a degree of suffering that is quite out of proportion to what it will achieve . . .’
‘Then you should have quit.’
She stopped. She turned. She blocked him. She stood in front of him. She cursed him. The passion flew. ‘I can’t, you can’t, none of us can quit. He started it, he’s going on with it. He trapped us.’
The Archaeologist softened. ‘He is the only hope. Without him it goes down the drain. He has so many problems, Alex, without your nagging, drip-dripping away at him. What I’m saying is, please, don’t add to it . . . Oh, and you should know, Gord thinks you are a hell of a fine woman.’
She snorted. She lengthened her stride. He grinned.
He heard the light knock at his door. He swung his chair. She was standing in the doorway.
‘Please come in, Miss Parker.’
It was more than seven months since Bren had last seen her, and that had been when he was hurrying along a corridor in the annexe and she was queuing at a coffee machine. Nothing said, just a thin smile from both of them. Nothing much to be said because he had only been in her bed when she was devastated by stress. She seemed aged from the young woman he had worked with in Ireland, a little of the red-gold lustre gone from her hair, and more weight at her hips, the colour gone from her face now that she was office-chained. Of course it was awkward, him on a promotion ladder and her on the plateau. She had come home, from what he’d heard, because tinted hair in a different style and glasses and a new operational location had still left her in danger. He had not been with another woman since he had left her, at the informer’s house, with death in the air.
He passed her the file.
He couldn’t lie to her. ‘I’m not the flavour of the day. We had a sniff at the guy and I marked it “No Further Action”. We need to know much more about him.’
She read the name on the file. ‘What do you need to know?’
‘Background, personality, military history, motivation psychology.’
‘What for?’
‘To ship across the water to Langley . . .’
‘Why?’
‘They can pass it down to Guatemala City, their field station – the detail is all in the file. Might help them to do the business with him.’
‘Does it matter to us?’
‘He’s our citizen and he’s rampaging in their back yard. Yes, it’s important . . .’
‘What’s the business?’
‘The better the profile they have of him the better the chance they have of stopping him . . .’
She seemed to rock for a moment, only a moment, and then her composure was regained.
‘. . . of stopping him and killing him,’ Bren said.
11
They climbed. They were above the tree line now. They wound forward in the mist of the rain.
Gord was at the back of the column. He tried to make a break between the fighting men and the women with their children, and the temper rose in him.
‘Would I like England?’
It was necessary to separate the fighting men from the women with the children, and he failed. He could not split them apart, make them tidy. He tried to force the pace from the back, to move the fighting men on at speed so that they were distanced from the struggle of the women with their children to hold the link, and it was late in the morning when he gave up, admitted the defeat.
Gord ignored the Street Boy.
There was a mess of bodies around him, but closest to him was the group that would not leave him. There was the Archaeologist who limped with the rub of the new boots. There was the Academic who still wore the old raincoat and who struggled with the weight of the cart. There was the Fireman whose heavy boots slithered on the wet rock and who levered the wheels over the harsher and more difficult ground. There was the Street Boy, half disappeared now in the enveloping anorak that he had stripped from a dead soldier, who drove the wheelbarrow forward.
‘Tell me, Mr Gord, what I would find in England.’
Gord’s England. The train coming back from his mother’s, scratching to remember the last newspaper he had read. The new unemployment figures. The new misery of houses clawed back by the banks. The new terror of the debt cycle. The new fear of walking an unlit alley. The new dread of a pensioner behind a barricaded door. The new society losing its nerve. The new police in their body armour, and the new pubs with their closing-time fights and broken glasses, and the new . . .
Gord sucked for breath. ‘It’s a great
place. Yes, perhaps, one day you’ll get there. Yes, it’s a good place.’
‘You will take me?’
‘Shut up, will you, do me a favour . . .’
He could not see the front of the column, where Jorge was, because the front was lost in the low cloud, and if he turned to look back then there was just the body mass of men with rifles and ammunition boxes and food baskets, and the women with their children and the bags and cases they had brought. They would not leave him.
It was their trust in him.
‘How long till we are in Guatemala City, Mr Gord?’
‘I told you to be quiet.’
‘How long?’
The deep breath and he could not fill his lungs. ‘If the rain holds, in five days.’
‘You mean it, Mr Gord, five days and we will be in the Palacio Nacional? Five days . . .’
Gord swiped at him, missed. ‘Shut your mouth . . .’
It was the second day of Gord’s week.
The rain held, stinging them. The cloud was thicker, swamping them.
He was trained for the desert sandscape in the Gulf, and he knew about jungle, and he was good in the rising hills of the province of Northern Ireland. The mountain was fresh to him. No experience of the emptiness of the lungs that could not be filled with the thin air. Searching for breath, not finding it, and the leaden weight of his legs, and the nausea rising in him . . . He thought it must have been an eagle. The bird came, near to him, in front of him, a shadow from the mist, and swooped into clarity with the falling calm of total control, then saw the column of men and women and children and thrashed the wide wing span to be clear of them. They were in the bird’s place. He thought it must be an eagle, its territory invaded, because it was as large as the birds that nested high on Sidhean Mor, and there was the cry of the bird that was a protest against intrusion. It was gone, lost in the cloud mist . . .
The Street Boy called, ‘Mr Gord, we could have shot it.’
He swung at the boy. This time he caught him.
What hurt Gord, wounded him, was that the Ixil Indian people of the triangle seemed to think nothing of the mountain altitude of the Cuchumatanes. They pressed on around him. They were quiet except for rare explosions of laughter. They slogged forward and at times there was only a dozen yards of visibility. What was he leading them to, in the cloud blanket settled on the mountain?
He could not show weakness.
They followed him.
The wheels of the cart ground behind him, slogging and trudging and stumbling forward.
Where Tom Schultz worked, he could see the line of stationary lorries.
He was bent inside the cockpit of the Huey bird.
The inspectors still swarmed in the embassy office but, big deal, permission had been given for Tom Schultz, Airwing DEA, to head off out to La Aurora. There was always maintenance time to be spent on the bird and he reckoned that he was well clear of the paperclip team; their target for the rest of the day would be the Treasurer and the hassle over Confidential Informant payments. Big hassle, always was, and would take an Einstein to match the payments to value and progress . . . he was well clear.
His bird was parked facing out of the opened door of the hangar that was allocated to DEA.
Their own birds were in a dismal line at the edge of the apron and the column of lorries was pulled up behind the line. He had seen the arguments. Pilots, not even changed into fatigues, and shouting and gesticulating at the officers who had come in jeeps at the head of the lorry convoy, refusing to fly.
With the argument at its fiercest, while the rain fell and bounced and glanced on the apron sheen, at least a company of the troops had been ordered down from the shelter of the lorries. They had gone, quick order marching, past the grounded birds, and they had shouted a kind of song, like it was a battle cry.
‘A Kaibil is a killing machine . . .’
Mean-looking bastards. He could read it.
‘A Kaibil is a man . . .’
The attempt to put some spine into the pilots.
‘A Kaibil controls the situation . . .’
Heh, guys, don’t take that shit . . . And the pilots of the parked birds were not taking shit, and were running back to the dry of their operations room, and their armchairs, and their lunch.
The troops of the Kaibil battalion returned expressionless to their lorries and their officers cursed and paced. They were mean-looking bastards, and they had the kit. They had machine guns and mortars and recoilless rifles amongst their feet on the floor of the lorries, and the NCOs wore at their belts the machetes that were carried in polished leather sheaths. Now, that would be a fight, when the guy they said was an Englishman and who had the flame thrower came into close-quarters combat with these mean-looking bastards. The fight that would settle it . . .
He had his head down. He reckoned there was a problem with the aft navigation light, intermittent cut-out . . .
‘You are the American?’
He looked up. The officer wore the insignia, sewn to his shoulder flaps, of a captain. It was a hard face. It was the face of a young man who would have risen from his cot at five, or four, and who would have prepared himself to be in a firefight by the middle of the morning. Tom nodded.
‘You are the American pilot who was at Playa Grande?’
‘That’s me.’
‘And you could fly in this weather?’
‘Well, wait a minute, I could . . .’
The captain interrupted him. ‘They are toy boys, our pilots. They say it is too dangerous to fly.’
‘I don’t think you should reckon it is easy up there.’
The accusation. ‘You could fly.’
Tom said, ‘It seemed important to be out of there, but it wasn’t a good place to be . . . Why don’t you just roll the trucks?’
Pain on the captain’s face. ‘We want to go . . . Where to go? We do not know where they are . . . They were in Nebaj, you heard that?’
‘No.’
‘They took the garrison town of Nebaj, with the fire . . .’
‘Heh, Jesus . . . Heh, that’s a good-sized town . . .’ Trying to remember the map, trying to place distances from the names that he knew from the map. A hell of a distance, on foot. Right, Nebaj was a good-sized town, with a good-sized garrison . . . ‘You’ve a situation going serious.’
The captain said, ‘We need the helicopters to find them. If the helicopters don’t fly then we cannot find them, cannot block them. What is the point of deploying on the road, and they will bypass us . . . How long is the weather due to last?’
He wanted the good news. Tom dashed him. ‘Could be two, three days. Could be a week. It’s sort of vague . . . Could they get to Guatemala City, if they have the weather?’
Tom looked into the young face.
The captain said simply, ‘Fire spreads. Fire has a reason of its own. Fire impresses the peasants. It is a rabble out there, but the fire has brought it together. If we cannot find them, block them, then they can destroy this country. It is not a country that is perfect, but is the United States of America perfect? It is our country and the Kaibiles will die for their country . . . I apologize for taking your time.’
He ducked his head, in respect, and walked away.
Tom bent again and looked to retrieve the wiring for the aft navigation light.
His fingers were clumsy and his mind distanced. He saw the man over whom his helicopter had banked, and he saw the flame thrower. He scratched at the scar tissue on his face, at the irritation, and tried to work with the wires.
Ahead of him, where he could see them, the troops sheltered in the cover of the lorries, and the pilots stayed away.
He was rolling, as if he was drunk. Pain in his legs and the ache in his chest. Forty minutes to the next rest halt. The weight of the machine gun dragged at his arms and the straps of the backpack slashed at his shoulder flesh. Great driving pants for air and once the Street Boy had reached to help him and he had thrust the hand away, and
once the Academic had sought to take the machine-gun burden and he had shrugged him off.
Always the rain and the mist of the cloud . . .
‘Is the hero suffering?’
‘Do me the favour, Miss Pitt, of walking somewhere else.’
‘We’re used to altitude. I’m here a week every month, in the mountains . . .’
‘Somewhere else, Miss Pitt.’
‘Is the hero too tired to talk?’
Gord snarled, ‘Do I want a conversation? No. Do I want a happy exchange of life histories? No. I want to get to the top of this heap of stone, and I want to get down the other side of it. Do I want to hear about your useless degree at Warwick, Reading, Sussex? No. Do I want to hear that you were brokering for some Jap bank, and were bored? No. Do I want to hear that you’ve a nice little job waiting back in brokering when you’ve had enough of dripping compassion? No . . . Be so good as to walk somewhere else.’
‘You’re every man I ever knew, just stuffed up with stereotyping.’
He looked away from her, from the mocking. The Academic rolled his eyes. The Fireman was laughing and the Street Boy giggling. The Archaeologist beamed. He wanted to sleep. Anywhere, at the side of the track, he could have slept. The water ran in a river on the track.
‘Please yourself, talk if you have to.’
‘It’s only because you looked after my dog . . .’
She walked well. The child slept on her shoulder. The old man leaned on her arm. He thought the child would have weighed at least a half of his backpack, and she had the sack of dog food still tied at her waist. The way she walked was brilliant. It was where he had first met the one woman he had cared for, walking in rain and wind at the limit of endurance. The one woman had been sent to them in Hereford, all the crack and all the snide, just a woman to be shown that the Brecons in wind and rain and at forced march speed were no place for her. That woman had kept with them, dug for the stamina, not failed. That woman had had a flat in Battersea and an answer machine. Good talk with the answer machine. He’d gone to the Gulf, she’d gone away. Just the memory of her flat, a long weekend in a sanitized two rooms that told nothing of her, and the silence of the answer machine afterwards when he had called. A last letter, sent from the post box beside the bar on the loch, returned as Not Known At This Address. Only the long weekend to remember a woman who could have walked the Cuchumatanes as she had walked the Brecons.
The Fighting Man (1993) Page 23
