The Fighting Man (1993) (15 page)

He shut the engine. The Treasurer was left to watch the Huey.

He tramped through the long grass and the butterflies played in flight near him and he went with the Intelligence Analyst and the Liaison the rest of the length of the strip. They walked between the two lengths of wheel tracks where an aircraft had landed and where it had been on a take-off run. It had been a heavy aircraft but with good Short Take-Off and Landing capability. It had to have been good STOL because of the length of the strip. By the edge of the strip they found where grass had been flattened by trampling boots. They went into the trees.

Before they were through the trees, Tom could smell the bodies. He had smelled the burned flesh, the scarred flesh, in the Gulf, but that wasn’t what he was remembering now. His father had taken him to a pig roast once, and an idiot had made a mistake with an unmarked canister and poured gasoline onto the carcass rather than cooking oil. It was that smell. He had his handkerchief to his nose. They came into the blackened cleared space. Near to the fuselage, close to the port side where the wing stumps had been sheared off, was the shallow grave. He reckoned it had been dug only a foot and a half deep, probably in panic, probably without ceremony. There were heaps of earth and dead scorched grass beside the grave and he thought that animals had dug at it. The Intelligence Analyst gagged, was fighting to hold his vomit. He walked round the wreck of the aircraft. The upper and lower starboard wings had been taken off, severed, the same as on the port side. He muttered something, to himself, that was almost a prayer. A pilot trying to hold his lady up in the air over the last line of the tops, and failing. The same prayer that he had yelled once, when the power was going in the bird, when the fire was spreading.

Away from the fuselage, at the extreme of the cleared area, the colonel watched over three squatting men. The colonel covered the men with his machine gun. The men were Indians. On the acclimatization course, out in the California sunshine at San Diego, he had learned about the Guatemalan Indians. Like it was a uniform they wore check shirts and jeans and had wide straw hats. He saw that the hand of one of them, maybe the youngest, was taken off at the wrist.

He went to the fuselage, he squinted to peer into the darkness and he slipped his glasses up onto the crown of his head.

The colonel called from behind him, ‘One of them tried to handle the cargo, lost his hand for it.’

Seconds ticking. Acclimatizing. Seeing more. The Intelligence Analyst was close, trying to share. Tom pointed to the skeleton shapes of the machine guns, and to the outlines of the rocket launchers. He pointed to the peppered holes in the fuselage, where bullets had exploded. He pointed to the rifles that had been in canvas bags of which only the straps remained.

He stepped back.

Tom said, ‘It was an Antonov, An-2, we call it Colt. It was stacked with war material. One aircraft made it in, and the other was short. I wouldn’t have thought it’s narcotics-related, looks to be insurgency stuff . . .’

He looked across at the colonel. The colonel knew the same answers.

The Liaison queried, ‘Who’s bringing that sort of shit in?’

‘Ask him.’

The colonel gave no response to the Liaison. With his boot the colonel drove the Indians to their feet. He made them walk ahead of him back to the helicopter. It had been a place of death and none of them, not Tom nor the Intelligence Analyst nor the Liaison, had the stomach for the familiarization swan-round that had been planned. At the helicopter the Liaison bandaged the wound of the youngest Indian. Tom thought that the colonel didn’t seem to care whether the wound was sanitized and covered with a field dressing.

They were all subdued, all had had the guts taken out of them, and the smell of the flesh seemed to cling to their fatigues.

The colonel took the rear seats in the bird, and he was talking hard at the Indians, using a dialect that hadn’t been taught at San Diego, and he was winning nothing. The Liaison took the seat left side of Tom, and the Intelligence Analyst and the Treasurer were in the seats between Tom and the colonel . . .

The starter whined, the rotors began lazily to turn, the turbine roared, power growing, nose lifting . . . He had been told when he had come to Guatemala City that the guerrilla war was finished, gone. That was all the chat in the embassy dining room from the Liaison and from the spooks and from the Defence Attaché’s staff. They all said that the fighting was history, that the guerrillas were fucked. Heh, then someone hadn’t been told.

He could fly the Huey in his sleep.

The concentration was second nature. His mind flitted. Inside the flying helmet he was alone, cut off. Heh, some poor bastards down there had been waiting for a war material shipment, and perhaps had lifted something off the successful flight, and perhaps had wept and kicked and screamed at seeing a load go down . . .

There was the motion behind him.

There was a shoulder belting into his back.

For Christ’s sake . . .

Tom turned, strained on his harness to see behind him.

Heh, cut the fucking . . .

He saw the colonel. The colonel stared straight back towards Tom. The two older Indians were cowered back in their seats away from the colonel. The seat next to the open hatch was empty, the harness straps hung loose. He heaved the cyclic stick over, banked the bird.

It was done fast enough. Tom saw the spreadeagled body, falling and drifting towards the green of the tree carpet.

Throwing the voice switch. ‘What the fucking hell happened?’

The Treasurer in his ear, booming. ‘He fell, Arturo says he fell.’

‘But . . .’

‘It’s what Arturo says. He fell.’

He took the bird back to Guatemala City.

‘I think that to take it any further is simply to waste our time.’

He was Gary Brennard, fast-stream graduate intake into Five, and he liked to be known as Bren. Since his return from Belfast he had risen at speed in the Security Service ranks, and he could thank the new witch’s broom that swept hard from the top-floor office for that. Wilkins retired, Carthew and Foster invited to look elsewhere for employment, Charles and Archie and Bill jumping before they were pushed, many others that he hadn’t known cleared out to shape the leaner Five. A new style that required fresh personnel was the message from the Director General.

He had the paper laid out on Hobbes’ desk. The messages from Fort William and from Glasgow and from Metropolitan Police (Special Branch) were displayed, and the replies from MOD Intelligence (Personnel) and SIS (Central America Desk).

‘Your opinion?’

‘Just another of these covert jerks with a chip on his shoulder the size of an omnibus.
Mr
Brown was drummed out of Special Forces after going native in the Gulf. There was something about a medal commendation down there but that was wisely withdrawn. He was only a captain, one more of them who believed he was God’s gift to soldiering. Done two tours in Northern Ireland, and my experience is that the Province gives Hereford people a hugely inflated sense of their importance. A decided question mark over a shooting on his first tour, observation on an arms cache, but he slipped through the inquiry net, as they always do, that crowd. Served in Germany before reunification. Been an instructor, you know, all of that running up mountains for the salvation of the soul. It is the usual career pattern before he went down to the Gulf and made a total fool of himself. Unmarried. Seems to me to be rather an inadequate personality . . . Anyway, a Guatemalan connection is just ludicrous. The conflict is finished there, has been for at least three years. The opposition to the legal government has been whipped. Safe to assume he’s ripping off some peasants, giving them crap and lining his pocket. Forget it.’

‘Your recommendation?’

Bren took out his Parker biro, his present to himself after this last promotion to the recently created Central America Desk. Over each sheet of paper laid out in front of Hobbes he wrote in bold fist, No Further Action. ‘Just thought I’d check with you.’

Hobbes smiled. ‘And be so kind to initial it, there’s a good fellow.’

He did that. Bren wrote his initials on each sheet of paper that would now be consigned to Library under No Further Action. He knew the type that was BROWN, Gordon Benjamin, and reckoned them stale piss.

Gord was at the back of the group, against the trees that ringed the clearing.

A grim day finishing.

It was, in truth, the start of the mission, and he knew it as they all knew it, but he hung back.

For the last time Jorge lectured Eff and Vee and Zed, and Zeppo and Harpo and Groucho were close with him and with the Indians, all of them huddled together. Three hours after the helicopter had crossed back over them. He had hoped there would not be a helicopter or a fixed wing, not so soon after the landing, not before the fast jungle growth had the chance to grow and twine over the Antonov wreckage. He didn’t understand the soft talk of Jorge, nor the blunt interjections of Harpo, but he saw the way that Groucho slapped Eff’s back as if he were a child for encouraging. Zeppo grinned at the three Indians, winked at them, and held Zed’s hand as if to strengthen him. It was the beginning of the mission.

The first village, the first settlement they could find, and their task was to slip inside a village or a settlement and avoid the Civil Patrollers and spread the secret word that Rodolfo Jorge, son of Ramírez of Acul, was again in Guatemala and looking for men. It was the beginning of the mission. Without men coming voluntarily to join them, they were dead.

He snatched at a mosquito. The clap of his hand was fast enough. He saw the blood smear on his palm.

It would be dusk soon above the tree canopy.

The Indians were gone.

They went in silence.

Within seconds their footfall was lost.

Gord sat hunched on the edge of the clearing. It was Zeppo for the first sentry watch, and Harpo to follow him, and then Harpo to wake Gord. He had time for drifting thoughts. Zeppo was back down the trail they had made in the approach to the clearing. There were the murmur voices of Harpo and Groucho and Jorge. They were home.

He sat beside the flame thrower and his fingers touched at the cart and the tubes and the pipes and wires that were linked. A light rain had started, a steady beat far above, and the drips falling sporadically on his head and his neck and his shoulders and his knees. Drifting thoughts that tried to identify a place as his home . . . if there had been a home then he would not have been hunched and quiet on the ant trails of the Petén jungle. Had to be a home . . . Home had been a suburb street and a semi-detached house that was both pebbledash and mock Tudor where his father came back to when the courts weren’t sitting and when the detectives no longer wanted to drink . . . Home had been at the Lines in Hereford where he had a room and a mess for eating and socializing, and a firing range, and a shower house for after the long runs on the Brecons . . . Home had been the flat of a girl in London’s Battersea, near the river, where he had once been given floor space, where there was an answerphone that he had learned to talk with, where a last letter from him had been sent and then returned as Not Known At This Address . . . Home had been the bar of a hotel on a sea loch near to the mountain of Sidhean Mor where the eagles flew . . .

There was no home.

Around him was what he possessed. His clothes and his boots, his pack and what it held, the AK-47 rifle and three magazines loaded, and the flame thrower slung on the cart. His fingers ran on the lines of the cart on the metal frame. He was not ready for sleep. He thought that none of them would sleep well that night, because Eff and Vee and Zed had gone and it was the start of the mission. He could find his way, without sight, around his pack and he took the plastic soap box from near the bottom, recognized it by touch. He threaded a needle with the strong cotton that he kept in the soap box. He was sewing together the worst of the thorn rips in the sleeves of his jungle shirt.

Jorge sat beside him. ‘You don’t wish to sleep?’

Gord said roughly, ‘If I leave the tears in the shirt then the mosquitoes have more scope to chew me.’

‘It is a big time for us. You know that, Gord?’

‘I know that.’

‘I considered going myself, but I don’t have the language for the Petén.’

‘It’ll come, your time.’

‘I don’t know what is the power of my name, and my father’s name.’

‘You have to wait, we all have to wait . . . Was there a manual?’

‘What?’

Gord asked it like he was shamed. ‘Was there a manual for the flame thrower?’

The chuckle, the laughter, Jorge’s mirth. ‘You demand it, you
require
it, and you don’t know how it does . . .’

‘I don’t bloody know how it works.’

‘I love you, Mr Brown – So correct. So severe. So logical. You are the professional man. The professional man demands,
requires
a flame thrower. We find a flame thrower. We take the flame thrower into the middle of the Petén jungle. All the time it takes two men to move the flame thrower – and you do not know how it works.’

‘It’s not necessary to tell the bloody world . . .’