by Cap Daniels
“If you’ll excuse us,” I said, “we’ve got a lot to do.”
He stepped within an inch of Clark, peering over his shoulder and eyeing our gear.
Clark unshouldered his ruck, and in one smooth motion, placed his palm on the man’s chest. “Back up, asshole.”
With blinding speed, the old man thrust Clark’s arm up and over his head, and he swept his legs. Clark hit the ground with a thud, landing facedown with his right arm twisted and pinned behind his back by the old man’s left knee. The muzzle of a Colt .45 Government came to rest against the back of Clark’s head, precisely where his spine became his brainstem.
I reacted just as I’d been trained. I took a step backward with my right foot and reached for my weapon with the full intention of sticking a bullet in the man’s right ear, but I didn’t draw. Before my hand had found the grip of my pistol, I found myself staring down the barrel of a second Colt .45 aimed at my nose.
The old drunk had pinned Clark to the ground and drawn a pair of pistols before either of us could react quickly enough to stop him.
Just as quickly as the man had subdued us, he leapt to his feet, holstered his .45s, and grabbed a pair of our Pelican cases. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got a long night ahead of us. Oh, and you two should stop underestimating how dangerous this jungle is. It’s the things you least expect that’ll get you killed down here.”
Clark climbed to his feet and dusted himself off. “Look, old man. If you try to pull that shit again. . . .”
The man never changed expressions. “If I pull that shit again, it’ll be to save your life or mine, so quit the idle threats and get in the helicopter.”
Clark’s left eye narrowed and he took in a long, deep breath through his nose, trying not to explode. I’d seen Clark explode, and it almost never ended well for those on the receiving end.
Unsure of what else to do, we followed our new friend across the airport tarmac and into a tin-covered hangar that looked like it belonged in an aftermath scene.
“Stow your gear on the chopper and strap it down. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
The man disappeared through a sheet hanging over a doorway, and he left me and Clark standing there—me amused, and Clark still pissed.
“It’s never dull,” I said as I started loading the helicopter.
“You’re right about that, Pretty Boy Floyd.”
We strapped our gear to the floor of the UH-1. Bell Helicopters named it the Iroquois, but the rest of the world knew it as a Huey. We started a preflight inspection and found no fewer than twenty bullet holes in the fuselage of the old bird. It appeared she’d seen more than her share of action. I suspected the old guy behind the curtain was no different and probably had a few bullet holes of his own.
The thirty-foot-tall metal doors on the front of the hangar rattled and creaked in protest as Leo shoved them to their stops at the ends of the worn steel tracks. The old man returned, but the transformation he’d undergone behind the curtain was remarkable. His torn floral print shirt had been replaced by a green flight suit, and where the floppy ragtag hat had been, now sat a black cowboy hat with the First Cavalry Division emblem gleaming on the front.
“I should’ve known,” chuckled Clark. “He’s an Air Cav cowboy.”
“That’s right, Baby Face.” He fingered the brim of his hat. “And these Stetsons are a lot sexier than those silly-ass green berets.”
He twisted the handle on the pilot’s door and climbed inside. Donning a headset, he went to work flipping switches and turning knobs on the forty-year-old chopper. Finally, the rotors began to turn, slowly at first, and then fast enough to turn every freestanding object in the hangar into an airborne squirrel, darting and twisting as if it had no idea where to go next.
The man yelled over the roar of the engine and rotor blades. “Well, don’t just stand there. Get in.”
We leapt inside, shielding our eyes from the flying debris.
“Is he really going to fly this thing out of the hangar?” Clark yelled.
I slid the door closed behind me. “Looks like it!”
We strapped ourselves into a pair of webbing seats and grabbed headsets from hooks on the forward bulkhead.
“Hang on back there. I’ve never tried this before,” came the tinny voice through the headset.
Clark shook his head and crossed himself.
“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” I said.
“I am today.”
The Huey’s skids left the hangar floor, and we hovered toward the doors. The air inside the hangar was a tornado of dust, debris, and garbage, and I had no idea how Air Cav could see through the brown cloud.
Finally, sunlight filled the cabin, and we began to pick up speed. The airport disappeared beneath us, and we headed out across Pavon Bay.
When my heart finally settled back into a normal rhythm, I spoke into the microphone of my headset. “You’re insane.”
The pilot glanced over his shoulder. “Thank you. Now one of you get up here and fly. I’ve got work to do.”
Clark unbuckled his harness and crawled into the left side of the cockpit.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” asked the pilot.
Clark inspected the controls and instrumentation, then placed his feet on the pedals and his hands on the cyclic and collective. “How hard can it be if an old cavalry troop can do it?”
The pilot gave Clark the finger and crawled out of the cockpit. As he passed my seat, he stuck out his hand. “I’m Leo, by the way. It’s nice to meet you. Now come help me get the gun set up.”
I shook his hand, tossed off my headset, and disconnected my harness. Leo and I hung an M-60 machine gun on a bracket by the door and a can of thirty-caliber ammo beneath the weapon.
“Are you expecting trouble?” I asked, looking over the machine gun.
“Nope, but if we find some, we’ll damn sure be ready for it.”
He slid open the door and locked it at its stops. He then clipped a nylon strap to his waist and rotated the gun out of the open door. Before I knew what was happening, he’d poured a stream of rounds into the jungle canopy below, yelling, “Yeah, baby!”
Grinning, he turned to me. “You ever shot an M-60, kid?”
I shook my head. He yanked the strap from his waist and fastened it around mine.
“Go ahead. Have some fun. There ain’t nothin’ down there to hit but monkeys, parrots, and jaguars, and we ain’t got enough bullets to put a dent in any of those population groups.”
I slid into the open doorway, pulled the huge rifle to my shoulder, and squeezed off a five-second burst. The power in the gun was undeniable, and a ribbon of bullets laced its way through the jungle canopy below.
He leaned in close to my ear and yelled. “Just remember, we’re doing a hundred knots across the ground, so if you have to shoot something, shoot where it will be, not where it is. This ain’t no sniper rifle. This here’s a spray-and-pray kinda play-pretty. Just don’t melt the barrel, and try not to fall out.”
With that, Leo left me alone with his play-pretty as we skimmed over the jungle canopy, barely above the treetops. Clark seemed to be just as at home at the controls of a helicopter as he was in anything with wings.
I pulled another headset from a hook above the door and slid it on. Leo was regaling Clark with stories of his glory days in Vietnam. I watched the jungle pass beneath us and listened silently.
“Yeah, it was a hell of a day. The whole damned valley was on fire. I’d been a pilot for less than eight weeks, and I’d been in the country for four whole days. We were hauling bodies and soon-to-be bodies out as fast as they could load ’em up. I was hanging out the window with my .45 in one hand and yelling at the G.I.s to hurry up, when this piece of shit Huey we were in started spinning like a top about six inches off the ground. The first thing that went through my head was that we’d lost the tail rotor. We were about to prang into the tree line and hopefully get a ride out of there with a crew that still h
ad a helicopter with all the important pieces on it.”
I thought about my father and the horrors he must’ve seen in that war. From what I’d learned about him from Padre in Charleston, my father was a warrior of the highest order. I wondered if Leo ever met my father.
Leo continued. “So, I was squirming my head and shoulders back into the helicopter, and we were still spinning like a . . . hell, like something that spins a lot. Anyway, that’s when it occurred to me that we were spinning the wrong way. If we’d lost the tail rotor, we’d be spinning to the right, but we were spinning left, backing up, and climbing. The CW4 in the right seat was old. I mean, really old, like thirty-two or something. I knew if anybody on Earth could get the airplane under control, it would be him, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing the controls. The cyclic was in my lap, the collective was full up, and the left pedal was pinned to the floor. The airplane was doing exactly what old Chief What’s-His-Name was telling it to do, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d be telling it to do that. I was dizzy, confused, and intrigued, but all three of those turned into shit-my-pants scared the instant I saw my pilot . . . or what was left of my pilot. His body was still sitting there in the right seat, but his head was gone. I don’t know who or what shot him, but I knew somebody was going have to fly that helicopter.”
I wondered how many thousands of stories just like that one and worse were floating around in the heads of the veterans of that war. War has to be the worst thing that humans do. I guess the worst scars of war are the ones no one ever sees—the ones left indelibly on the minds of those who lived the horrors and survived. Perhaps their bodies survived, but a part of all of them died with every pull of the trigger, and with every brother they watched fall. I knew Clark had to bear more scars than he’d ever show me, but I hoped he knew I’d listen if he needed to talk. But maybe that’s not what soldiers do. Maybe they prefer to fight the demons alone rather than risk letting them loose and seeing what the demons might do to the people they love.
While I was playing backseat psychotherapist, the Huey banked hard right and started diving into the jungle canopy. I braced myself against the M-60 and leaned back, trying to take Leo’s advice and not fall out of the helicopter.
Before I could think to ask what we were doing, a cloud of red-brown dust engulfed us, and we settled to the ground, landing like a butterfly in the only clearing for fifty miles.
The engine fell silent, and the rotors spun to a stop overhead. Leo hopped from the Huey and headed for a bamboo hut a hundred feet away. Clark and I crawled from the chopper and followed. When we reached the bamboo hut, we discovered Leo counting out American hundred-dollar bills into the hand of a wrinkled old man behind a bamboo table. Everything in the place was made of bamboo, except the floor was jungle dirt with Persian rugs scattered around.
Without a word, Leo strolled out of the hut, picking up two bottles of liquor from a shelf near the door. I watched the old clerk, or whatever he was, disappear out the back, and I soon heard an engine roar. The oldest, most decrepit fuel truck I’d ever seen lumbered its way toward the Huey.
“I needed fuel.” Leo held up his two bottles of clear liquor. “And the chopper needed gas.”
“What is this place?” I asked as I swatted mosquitoes and half a dozen other flying things I couldn’t identify.
“This, Pretty Boy, is Tienda de Bambú. It’s your basic one-stop-shop in the rainforest for whatever you need, from tequila to jet fuel, and almost anything in between.”
The Bamboo Store in the middle of the jungle. And they have jet fuel. Amazing.
The fuel truck, such as it was, completed its task of gassing up the Huey, and then lumbered its way out of sight. We climbed back aboard.
The turbine whistled itself up to an eventual roar, and the blades started turning.
“Are we going to be needing this gun?” I reattached the lanyard to my waist.
Leo looked over his shoulder. “I hope not, but let’s not put it away just yet.”
I started to spit out something witty when a flash of movement caught my eye from the back of the chopper where our gear was strapped down.
Perched like a jungle cat atop one of our Pelican cases was a small, sinewy, dark-haired man. I immediately drew my pistol and leveled it between his black eyes.
I expected to see his hands go up in surrender, but he smiled, exposing a metal ring and pin clenched between his teeth. My eyes moved to his left hand, where he held a pinless, standard-issue hand grenade between his thumb and forefinger. With the slightest pressure required, he held the spoon in place. I knew if I pulled the trigger, I’d spend the next ten seconds hoping to find that loose grenade rolling around the floor of the chopper before it went off. We had undeniably reached an impasse.
“Uh, guys, we’ve got a visitor back here.”
Clark and Leo turned to look back, and Leo laughed.
“Oh, yeah. I probably should’ve told you about him. Pretty Boy, meet Diablo de Agua.”
I holstered my pistol and made a mental note to shoot Leo if I ever got the chance.
Diablo pulled the pin from his mouth, slid it back into its slot, and dropped the grenade into a satchel at his waist.
Diablo never looked directly into my eyes. Instead, he kept his focus on my pistol, even after I’d returned it to my holster.
His eyes darted about as if he were surveying me for additional weapons. Finally, he rose from his crouch atop my Pelican case and moved silently to the door. His legs weren’t long enough to reach the skids, so he sat with his feet dangling outside the helicopter in midair.
Leo was flying, but Clark stared backward out of the cockpit, not taking his eyes off the man Leo had called Diablo de Agua. He finally glanced at me and then back at the bizarre, little man. I shrugged, and Clark shook his head and chuckled.
We rose from the clearing and watched the Tienda De Bambú disappear behind us. Unlike the water devil, my legs reached the skids, so I sat beside him and offered a headset. He glanced at the green David Clark headset but never reached for it. I went to put it on his head for him, but I backed off, not knowing what he might do if I actually touched him.
“I’m Chase,” I yelled over the roar of the engine and rotor.
For the first time, he made eye contact with me, but he wore a blank expression of disinterest and gave no response.
We flew on for another hour as Diablo carefully surveyed the jungle canopy below. His eyes were like those of a cat; they darted toward any movement in the trees. I half expected him to leap from the chopper when something caught his attention. He would lean forward to get a better look, but he never jumped. And he never said a word.
We landed in a clearing barely larger than our helicopter on an island due south of Panama City. Just before the skids touched down, Diablo leapt from the chopper and promptly dissolved into the forest.
“Where are we?”
“Come on, Pretty Boy. Don’t you know your Central American geography?” Leo laughed as if he were the keeper of all knowledge. In that group, he was exactly that when it came to the land and the islands.
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to where we were going. I was too busy worrying about that little freak and what he was going to do. That’s one weird little dude,” I said as I scanned the tree line in a vain attempt to locate him.
“Ha! He’s harmless, as long as he’s on your side. But you’re right. He’s a little odd. Did he talk to you?”
“No, he didn’t talk to me. He didn’t say a word. He just threatened me with a grenade and then jumped out and vanished as soon as we got close to the ground.”
Leo saw me staring into the trees. “Forget about spotting him, son. He’s part of the rainforest now. You’ll only see him if he wants you to see him. I’ve known him for the better part of a decade, and he’s never said more than a dozen words to me. He’s strange, but there’s nobody better at what he does.”
In his typic
al style, Clark stood, and I knew he was silently taking mental notes.
I asked what we were both thinking. “What does he do?”
Leo spat and then wiped at his mustache. “Well, he gets into places no one else can, commits everything inside the place to memory, and then escapes without ever being seen. It’s the damnedest thing.”
“What good does it do for him to commit anything to memory if he won’t tell anyone what he’s seen?”
“Oh, he’ll tell one person,” Leo said.
I waited, but he clearly wasn’t going to volunteer the name.
Impatiently, I asked, “Who?”
“Ginger.”
“Who’s Ginger?”
“Ginger is an analyst who used to work at Langley. Now she works for us.” Leo looked at his watch and then at the sun. “Let’s get some netting over the chopper before it gets dark.”
Camouflage netting was something Clark understood well. He pulled the two heavy bags from the back of the helicopter and rolled out the mesh. We tied the blades to the skids, and I climbed on top of the airframe. In no time, our Huey was virtually invisible from above.
“Bona,” said Leo.
“What’s Bona?”
“That’s where we are,” he said. “We’re on the island of Bona. There’s nobody else here. It’s just an uninhabited rock in the Pacific with more trees than most. We’ll spend the night here while Diablo decides how he wants us to get him on that ship, and then we’ll do whatever he thinks is best.”
“So, that little freak is in charge of this mission?”
“No, Pretty Boy. You are. This is your circus, and you’re the ringmaster. I’m just the driver, and that ‘little freak’ out there is your main attraction. Now, I think it’s time you met Ginger.”
We climbed into the chopper and Leo pulled out a large, black case. He pulled a satellite dish from the case and arranged it facing almost straight up. He plugged a laptop computer into the satellite dish, pressed the power button, and waited.
