Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (5 page)

The radio Danny Pastor had slung from the dash kept on playing: warriors and wise men, flowers and sad songs, Mexican night
rolling by. Luz María was awake, saying nothing. Clayton Price was awake and thinking about Centipede, about the time they’d
gone into Ecuador as a team and taken out three revolutionaries who were using the drug trade to finance leftist efforts on
behalf of a better world. That was damn near the end for both of them. If it hadn’t been for the gutsy pilot in the old C-47,
it would have been the end. He’d landed on grassed-over asphalt and slowed only enough to let them run alongside and climb
in the cargo door, as if they were hopping a freight. Tortoise and Centipede, tight-lipped at first, then laughing and giving
each other a high-five when they’d made it over the Andes. Insertion was hard enough, extraction was where it always got real
close. Like now, in Mexico.

His shoulder pressed against the Bronco’s door as Danny Pastor took Vito around a hard, left-bending curve. A long, strange
life, it had been that all right. From the beginning, it seemed, promised to the field of battle. Way back in another time,
he might have been something else, a sailor on one of Cook’s voyages or a mountain man in the high evergreens.

Mountain men… from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, you could see Manhattan across the East Paver, and on foggy days the towers
resembled mountains; that’s how he’d imagined it when he was young. He’d sat in the bay window of his parents’ fourth-floor
walk-up, three floors above an Italian restaurant taking up the whole bottom floor, and had thought about mountain men. He’d
read about them in a library book and after that wanting to be one and having the freedom to go where the wind took you and
coming back only when you felt like it. No buses, no subways, no school, none of that.

The day he’d left Park Slope for good was low hung and dark, foggy a little, and the towers had looked like mountains again.
He’d stood there looking at them across the East River getting ice along its edges, thinking it might be the last time he’d
see those mountains, probably for sure the last he’d see of them from this window. He was going to Minnesota, and he wasn’t
certain if there were mountains out there or not, didn’t think so. Lakes, though, that’s what his mother said. She’d told
him that a week before, exactly a month to the day after his father had pulled out, leaving Clayton and her alone.

When Clayton had asked, “Why’d Dad leave us?” his mother replied, “Elmer just felt closed in, I guess.” She’d been all weepy
and slumped over when she’d said it.

Clayton was the youngest of five children, the other four gone and paying their way, and his parents had been old by parent
standards when he’d come along, unexpected and unwelcome.

“We didn’t plan on Clayton,” his mother had said once to a friend of hers and not aware Clayton could hear them talking. “There
were things we wanted to do, and they didn’t include another child. My God, four are enough to raise in this world.”

“Land sakes, yes.” The other woman had nodded in fast agreement, sweeping her hand as if she were brushing away unwanted children.
“I should think so. We stopped after three. Nobody needs a caboose these days.”

His mother had sat him down and told him what was for sure and what had to be done. “Clayton, I’ve found a job at Landowski’s
Cleaners over on Fourteenth, but I can’t make enough to take care of us both, Your grandparents out in Ely say it’s all right
if you come and live with them for a while. It’s real nice there, lots of lakes and woods, You’ll be happier out of the city.
I’ll find a smaller place I can afford and send along a little money if I can.”

Clayton Price had looked at his mother, blue eyes running toward gray looking straight at her. His father was gone, his mother
was sending him away… . “We didn’t plan on Clayton… . There were things we wanted to do.” He’d understood, in a way. She already
looked old at fifty-two, as old as his grandparents looked in the photograph on the bureau in her room, and they looked older
than Jim Bowie’s grave.

Clayton may have understood… kind of, why his parents hadn’t wanted him, how he’d screwed up their plans. He may have understood…
kind of, but he’d been only ten and a caboose at that, and Ely, Minnesota, had seemed forever out there someplace.

Margaret Price and her unexpected youngest son had ridden the train to Manhattan. There she’d put Clayton on a bus headed
west. November 29, 1952, that’s when it was, and snowing heavy by late afternoon. Margaret Price always remembered afterward
how hard it had been snowing when Clayton got into the Greyhound. Army had defeated Navy 7—0 earlier in the day, Ike was going
to be the new president, the French Union forces in Vietnam were doing pretty well and looking as if they’d stopped the march
of communism right in its tracks.

The bus had rolled out of the Port Authority Terminal and Margaret Price was waving to Clayton on that day and not able to
see him very well behind the steamed-up windows. Clayton Price had eight dollars in his pocket, and Ely, Minnesota, had looked
like a long way down the road. He’d wondered again for about the millionth time why his father left when and how he did, just
pulling out that way, and that was something nobody ever knew.

“The bus drivers’ll help you, Clayton, and your grand-folks’ll meet you in Duluth.” His mother had said those words somewhere
around twenty times that one afternoon before the Greyhound closed its big door with a sigh and headed for a far place.

Clayton had wiped at the steamy window beside him, making circular motions with his mitten on the glass, trying to see his
mother one more time. She’d stood there and was hard to see in all the smoke from a lot of buses and on the other side of
a window that was dirty on the outside and which Clayton couldn’t get perfectly free of steam on the inside no matter how
hard and fast he’d wiped it. People were already carrying Christmas packages, hurrying through the weather and passing in
front of and behind Margaret Price in her black cloth coat and faded orange scarf. Big wheels turning and Margaret Price running
then alongside the bus on the wet street with her purse hanging over her left arm and flopping out there all the while she
ran. And Clayton reading her lips with which she was saying, “I love you,” but he didn’t believe it then and didn’t later
on and never would after that day.

When he’d finished boot camp at Parris Island in 1960, both Margaret and Elmer Price had come down for the ceremonies. He
hadn’t invited them, but his grandmother had written Margaret and said Clayton had joined the marines partly because his teeth
needed a lot of fixing and the government said they’d fix his teeth if he joined up. His parents had gotten back together
a year after he’d left Park Slope but never said anything about him coming back there and sending instead some money to Ely
each month to help out with his board.

His head had been shaved close for the ceremonies, and he’d received a special award for marksmanship. A younger Clayton Price
had been able to hit a jackrabbit on the run in heavy brush by the time he left Ely, could do it with a .22-long rifle bullet.
He hadn’t cared much for shooting at stationary targets the way they had in boot camp, and it wasn’t hard measured up against
what you had to do in the woods, particularly for Clayton Price. Some people can draw faces or make pool balls dance to any
tune they want right from the start; others can think through mathematics and paint in watercolors. Clayton Price could handle
guns and eventually outshot twenty-six hundred other marksmen at the National High-Power Rifle Championship at Camp Perry,
Ohio. He did that later on in the early sixties, did it shooting at a target a thousand yards out where the bulls-eye looked
like a pinhead down his scope.

His parents had come up to him after the ceremony and all full of pride and saying how fine he looked in his uniform. Clayton
hadn’t smiled, not even a flicker of one, and he hadn’t been trying to hold it back or anything, it just hadn’t been there
for these people from another time, from a different planet or another world, was how he thought of them back then and still
did ever after in the times out in front of him. But the marines in addition to fixing his teeth had taught him something
about being a gentleman, so he’d shaken hands with both of them and hadn’t done any more than just that all the while his
mother was standing on her tiptoes and kissing his cheek and having her picture taken with him. Said then he had to go, even
though he hadn’t gone anywhere except back to the barracks, where he’d cried a little over seeing those people from another
world again and knowing then he’d never go near them, not one more time in his life. Also knowing the best way to go from
there on out was not to count on anyone ever again or even to care for anyone again or let anyone care for you.

And a few years later, dawn and warm rain falling on leaves and grass, mist above the rice paddies. Twelve hours in the “hide”
with gnats around your face and ants crawling in your ears and under your clothes… leeches hanging on to you… mosquitoes biting
and you can’t swat them away, no movement allowed. Becoming part of the landscape. Estimating windage by the feel of it on
your face and the bend of grass five hundred yards out, watching heat waves to get a sense of how the bullet will ride. Living
for a week on nothing but water and basic C-rations—peanut butter, jelly, cheese, and crackers. Four more killing days to
Christmas, as a major had said before the chopper took off last night.

Lying there, concentrating, looking for a movement of brown or green in a wall of brown and green. Scanning the natural lines
of drift where people tend to walk or rest. Mornings and evenings are best. Charlie’s just waking up or tired and careless
after a day’s work.

The beat of your heart against the earth, the smell of solvent residue coming off your rifle bolt, a flat-shooting Remington
700 with a Redfield nine-power scope.

“There he is,” your spotter whispers. “The hamburger in the door, epaulets and clean uniform, binoculars. NVA colonel.”

Officers: Always look for the clean uniform, the binoculars, the one with a radio man close by. Dumb bastard’s standing in
the door of a hut, yawning.

Check your body position and scope picture.

“I make it eight five zero yards,” you whisper.

“Eight fifty, eight seventy-five,” your spotter whispers back.

It all seems kind of… kind of dreamlike. “four teacher, White Feather, calls it his “bubble,” going into a place of concentration
and focus so clear that it becomes a universe of its own where nothing and no one can intrude.

Check again: the bend of grass, the heat waves.

Wait for the flattest part of your breathing cycle.

Control the trigger pull, the follow-through.

The recoil against your shoulder, and on the other side of the valley, a man jolts back into the darkness of a hut.

Your spotter gives you a thumbs-up, and the two of you begin a reverse crawl down your escape route.

The world of Clayton Price.

A strange world, and a long, strange life, aloneness mostly, loneliness sometimes. Never a woman for any amount of time. Nothing
like the one riding close behind him, the one he could smell in the compressed space of a Bronco called Vito when they slowed
and the breeze no longer blew away the pleasant mix of perfume and sweat coming off her. He straightened in his seat and glanced
back. Luz María was looking at him.

In the Learjet hammering southwest, different smells. The distinct, unalloyed scents of coffee and gun oil. Walter McGrane
glanced up when he heard the soft click of a rifle bolt. One of the men across from him was examining the sniper rifle. He
watched the man work the bolt, checking over the tool of graceful agony that could have been a candidate for an award in contemporary
design, curving metal and angular parts machined to a level of precision usually reserved for fine watches. The man, machined
to precision like the rifle and known to him only as Weatherford, ran a soft cloth along the barrel as if he were touching
a woman.

The rifle, forty-four inches long and weighing a little over fourteen pounds with its scope, was chambered for a match-grade
7.62,173-grain bullet. One second after being fired, the bullet would hit the center of a man s chest at a thousand yards,
over a half mile away, every time, in the hands of a skilled marksman, and the men across from Walter McGrane were skilled.
Sometime in the next few days, if things went well and the Mexican government stayed out of their way, the reticles on the
sniper’s scope would lie across the chest of Clayton Price, who would never hear the sound that killed him.

Walter McGrane didn’t like going after one of their own. He didn’t much like any of this anymore. But so be it and so it lay.
He was a field man by his own preference, and he’d been ordered to do it by the Pure Intelligence office boys, the suits,
the idiot theoreticians, “espiocrats,” as le Carre or somebody had called them. Those who’d never used a dead drop in Bucharest,
had never worn goggles in the blowing dust of Algeria while a jeep climbed rocky outcrops, had never done a goddamned thing
except go to school. Had no idea what the field was like, the calm and concentration on the face of a man such as Broadleaf
when you were putting him out in some bloody middle-of-nowhere to do a job. On paper, everything looked good. In the dust
and smoke out where it all happened, there was always the human factor, the Clayton Prices going off the path and screwing
up the neat calculations and impeccable logic.