The Fighting Man (1993) (10 page)

They swept in.

There was the bubble of their laughter.

There was the shriek of their fun.

Gord’s hand dropped.

They poured into the room. Eff and Vee and Zed, each of them carrying the identical tubes. The tubes were three, four feet long. They were painted dull green with the nozzles forward. There was a young man behind them and he wheeled the cart into the hotel bedroom.

The young man said, ‘It’s what you wanted . . . ? It’s what you asked for . . . ? You wanted the TPO-50. You required the flame thrower.’

Gord gazed into the youth of the face.

The young man said, ‘I tell you, Mr Brown, it was not meant for taking up the stairs . . .’

Dark hair sleeked and combed to a parting, hazel eyes, close-shaven over a flawless skin that could have been a girl’s, white teeth showing in the grin.

‘. . . I am Jorge, Mr Brown. I am Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. I apologize to you for my rudeness in not having before made the time to see you. Please accept my apology.’

The opened ticket was on the bed, the filled plastic bag on the floor.

Not his way, Gord stumbled. ‘. . . It doesn’t matter . . .’

‘I heard, Mr Brown, that you had been to the offices of Aeroflot . . . in my opinion, from what I have been told, I would prefer to go in, one engine lost, cratered dirt strip, contested landing, to Guatemala – rather than fly Aeroflot across the Atlantic – just what I have been told . . .’

He had his composure again. Gord said, cold, ‘I accept your apology. I also accept that I made a mistake. There’s not really much more to talk about.’

Gord saw their fun drained. Eff and Vee and Zed held the tubes loosely.

‘May I talk, Mr Brown?’

‘You can do what you like.’

‘Can we not be comfortable, Mr Brown?’

‘I have one hour until I need to go to the Aeroflot office.’

The young man squatted on the floor. Gord sat on the bed. Eff and Vee and Zed cradled the tubes and stood in line against the wall.

‘I learned my English at the school. You will excuse me if it is not adequate . . . My country, Mr Brown, is a military camp. The regime in Guatemala survives by terror. To speak for freedom, the rights that are second nature to you, is to invite the attention of the Death Squads. To fight for freedom is to invite the retaliation of the army. In my country, Mr Brown, freedom belongs only to the generals, and the politicians to whom they have given power . . .’

Gord listened. Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez talked the detail of the armed forces of Guatemala. The structure, the deployment, the firepower. He glanced at his watch. Time running.

‘. . . My country is divided in many ways, Mr Brown. It is divided by privilege and opportunity so that a ruling oligarchy, a tiny minority, controls the vast majority of the wealth. There is division in health care, division in education, division in human rights – and there is the division of racism. The subjugation of an ethnic majority is at the heart of my country’s nightmare. The ethnic majority of Guatemala are the Mayan Indian people. If the majority were to receive their share of the wealth of Guatemala then the privilege of the minority would be threatened. Do I speak like a communist, Mr Brown, or do I speak of a fairness that is natural to you? The Indian people and their culture have suffered a consistent programme of genocide, of torture, of abuse, of displacement . . .’

Gord had heard it before. He had heard it in the souk and the mosque and the coffee houses of Karbala, before he had walked out, before the tanks had attacked.

‘. . . My father and mother were what is called
Ladino
, they are of Latin descent, but they chose to make their lives amongst the Indians of the Ixil triangle. My father was trusted, did not cheat them. My mother was loved, nursed them. The war came, my father was a leader. He was a humble man, he would have claimed no genius, but he understood the common sense of war. He led a rebellion. For two years that rebellion was too strong for the military. After two years the military came with air strikes and helicopters and the Kaibil battalion . . .’

Gord had imagined it before. The armoured columns overrunning the barricades of the Shia men and women that he had walked out on. There was a darkness in the room.

‘. . . On the second evening, after my mother had been killed, after the ammunition was exhausted, after he had been squeezed back to our store and our home, the last strongpoint, the military broadcast on loudspeakers that all the men who surrendered would be safe, except for my father. It was his decision. The decision lay with him for the rest of his life. He took me, I was thirteen years old, and he took his oldest and most trusted friends. In the darkness it was possible for a few to slip clear. All the time that we ran I could hear his weeping. When we were a few miles away, on higher ground than the village, we saw the fire of the church of Acul. All the men that surrendered were burned alive, Mr Brown. We lived . . .’

Gord knew what had happened in Karbala. He had heard it afterwards. He knew of the executions by shooting and by hanging. He knew of the terror that had been brought to the city by the security teams that had followed the tanks.

‘. . . I promised my father that I would return. I made the promise to him when he was close to death. I want to go back to Guatemala, Mr Brown, and I want to drive out the bastards who could herd men into a church and set fire to it. I want to go back, Mr Brown, and root out the bastards who serve the army by day and the Death Squads by night. I want to go back, Mr Brown, to restore the dignity of an Indian society that had a civilization five hundred years before the birth of Christ. I believe that in my country there is a people that will follow me . . .’

Gord looked at his watch, saw the lines of the luminous hands. The Aeroflot would be boarding.

‘. . . I want you at my side, Mr Brown. I hope that I have my father’s common sense, but I have no military training. I want your skill and your experience and your knowledge. The people will follow us, the regime will disintegrate, it is corrupt and rotten and it will fall. I don’t know what you have in your home country, Mr Brown, what you have that is more important . . . It might still be possible, just, for you to catch your flight . . .’

The young man had taken him, and he could recognize it. He was the moth brought to the bulb, the nail slapped against the magnet’s face. Something about the voice and something about the humility and something about the optimism. The Aeroflot was lost. It was not his way to clasp a man’s hand, nor to hug his shoulders, but his commitment was made to Jorge who had captivated him.

Gord said, quiet, ‘You did well to get the flame thrower.’

The chuckle from the floor in the gloom of the room. ‘The flame thrower, that was nothing, it was the two aircraft that were difficult.’

Something that his father had said, something about making footprints.

Under arc lights the crates that held the weapons and the boxes of ammunition, and the frame of the TPO-50’s cart with the fuel tubes were loaded onto the two aircraft.

There were ten of them who would fly.

4

They flew in radio silence, without navigation lights, and hugged the sea surface. No bogus flight plan had been transmitted to the air-traffic controllers of Tegucigalpa or Managua or San José or Guatemala City.

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.