The Fighting Man (1993) (17 page)

Tom followed the Intelligence Analyst out of the Country Attaché’s office.

He went to his desk. He had the lists in front of him. No more thought of coca compounds, nor of precursor chemicals, nor of the bank accounts of the narco-traffickers in the Caymans and Miami.

Big work ahead of him, high grade work.

The government’s inspectors were in next week to check the inventory of DEA station, Guatemala City. As he had seen in St Louis, a government inspector dissatisfied with the inventory could break a station chief, like he was dried wood. He was on the engine spares list, held in the lock-up area out at La Aurora. A government inspector was more important than knowing whether a kid had been pushed, or fallen, from the open hatch of a Huey bird, no argument.

He was deep in his inventory lists.

The Treasurer had told him that it was hassle for all of them if one slipped up. The Treasurer wanted to know each last paperclip that was not accounted for so that the cover excuse could be manufactured. Apparently, two years back, the DEA team’s oldest jeep, bad steering and worse brakes, had gone over the edge of a hundred-foot ravine off a rain-damaged track up in Totonicapán district. Tom guessed that jeep would have been loaded down with paperclips and everything else that could not be accounted for in the inventory. It was the way of government service . . .

‘You take it personal?’ The Intelligence Analyst stood behind him.

Tom said softly, ‘It’s just a job . . .’

‘It can be hell and it can be great.’

‘The bastard pushed him.’

‘Sunny Guatemala, Tom, where life comes on a discount. They say that for twenty-five dollars you can get a man killed here. It’s that sort of place . . . Listen to me, and this isn’t meant unkind, it wasn’t necessary of you to have gotten involved, it wasn’t clever. You’re best staying with the flying.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ve a heap of paper.’

The rain had cleared. The jungle steamed in dampness. It had been a short and overwhelming thunderstorm, vivid sheet lightning.

Harpo was better than Gord had rated him.

They had taken a position on a great rock mass and they had crawled forward under the vine and ivy covering of the rock, and they looked down from the edge of the cliff onto the road. The road was beaten stone and ran straight as far as they could see, right to left, and there were water pools in the potholes. The block on the road was not immediately in front of the rock mass but about seventy-five yards right of it. The rock mass gave them the best vantage point and the height to cover the block and to see what approached from either north or south. Harpo was better than Gord had rated him because he had moved quietly, steadily, on their approach to the road, crawling the last hundred yards. It was good work for a man of his age and his size, and Gord acknowledged the quality. They lay on their stomachs and the network of vine and ivy filtered the sun that fell on them. They were through the tree line and they relied on the vine and ivy for concealment.

The ground either side of the road, twenty yards back from the beaten stone, had been bulldozer-cleared. It was standard in counter-insurgency warfare to hack back foliage from beside a military route. He thought the soldiers, seven of them, had been dropped by lorry, had been abandoned on the road for several days’ stay because they had pitched tents on the cleared ground and they had no wheeled transport. The soldiers rested in the sunshine. Their confidence was on show. No sentries were out down the road, neither to the north nor the south, nor back against the tree line. The transistor played loud Latin music. Through an open tent flap, Gord saw the communications radio, and an aerial had been draped from the roof of the tent. Three of the soldiers, as they ambled on the road, carried Israeli Galil rifles. There was a light machine gun with a bipod mount, there was a small mortar, and more rifles lay haphazardly on the ground near the tents. They had laid a chain of spikes across the road.

From the high rock Gord heard the engine before the soldiers. Butterflies hovered close to his face, parrots called in the tree line behind him.

He studied the place for the potential of a killing ground. It was Gord’s way, his training. He had known a killing ground in the South Armagh district of Northern Ireland, and in the interior of Iraq, and he had tried to help the Shia of Karbala choose the best ground for killing.

He thought it was the engine of a bus. Coming from the south, it roused the camp. The lethargy was slung off the soldiers. A soldier lay behind the light machine gun. Two of the soldiers took a theatrical position in the centre of the road, posturing authority. Gord saw the bus.

The bus was ancient, multi-coloured, and a haze of fumes followed it. When it was a hundred yards from the spiked chain on the road, when the soldiers in the road were waving their authority at the driver for him to slow and stop, one of the troopers was gestured by the soldier who wore a corporal’s stripes back to the largest of the tents. The bus halted in the centre of the road. A soldier shouted through the driver’s window. The passengers, men and women and children, spilled from the door of the bus down onto the road. The passengers were all Indians. Gord saw the jumble of straw hats and bright blouses and skirts, and he could hear the crying of children. The passengers were lined up at the side of the road. A man, civilian clothes, had been brought from the largest tent. He was hooded but Gord could see, just, the eye slits in the hood. There were two soldiers inside the bus to search it. The hooded man was escorted by the corporal along the length of the line of passengers and near to the end of the line he stopped and he pointed, and Gord saw that the man who was recognized crumpled the moment before the soldiers dragged him clear of the line. He thought it was routine. The bus was searched, the passengers were screened. The bus was loaded again. The hooded figure was taken back to the tent. The spiked chain was pulled back and the bus drove away slowly, coughing a cloud of diesel. The man who had been marked out was kicked as he knelt beside the road, then taken across the cleared ground to the edge of the trees. Gord had no need to watch. He heard the cocking of the weapons. The man who had been marked was shot not more than forty paces from the rock mass where Gord lay with Harpo.

In the evening, as the dusk gathered on the clearing, it was talked through.

Gord said, ‘We should bypass the block. Once we start shooting then we are running. We fire the first shot, and that is the beginning of the charge. It is not the right time.’

Harpo said, ‘The people will not rise until they hear of us. Each time they hear of our strike then more will come.’

Jorge said, ‘Where we find them, we kill them. We light the fire.’

He was the outsider, the intruder. ‘So be it.’

On the ground of the clearing Gord scratched with a stick and made a plan of the roadblock and the tents and the position of the communications radio and the siting of the machine gun.

In the morning the play-acting would end.

He lay on the ground and he wept.

First time that he had sobbed tears since the rabbit that was his pet had been taken and eaten by Mrs McFarlane’s cat.

The Archaeologist dragged himself away from the bodies and into the long grass and howled at the jungle round him, shouted his anguish. He was twenty-nine years old. It was the first time he had sobbed tears since the cat had come over the fence and into the yard of the prim home in Garden City outside Ames, the town on the Chicago and North Western rail line that cut the state of Iowa east to west. He had been eleven years old when he had last sobbed tears.

The place was not like Tikal. There were no guides and no souvenir shops and no hamburger bars and no tourists round the temple pyramid. The place was where he had been most happy in all of his life. It was the place of the hidden civilization of the Mayan Indian dynasties that had lain lost, unmapped and unexplored, for a millennium. Trees rising to the light of the sun had towered over the pyramid construction, hiding it from aerial photography, protecting it from the abuse of the New World. He had found the place.

The Archaeologist was on a year of sabbatical leave from the University of Minnesota.

Sixty miles south-west of Flores which was the central city of the Petén region, near to the village of Chinajá, in a fly-blown coffee shop, an old Indian who had no teeth had told the Archaeologist of the place in the jungle depth.

It was his own place. It had been his own place until that morning.

With two Indians, good and solid men with the strength of oxen, he had made the camp late in the previous year. He had lived native, eating what his workers ate, dressing as they did and leaving his American-tagged clothes in his rucksack, learned their language. The power of modern government had bypassed this empty quarter under the high tree canopy. It had been his first visit back to Guatemala City since he had found the pyramid site and he had posted to his department at the University of Minnesota the records of seven months of archaeological detection, and he had returned. He was not to know who or what had broken the secrecy of his hidden life: a marked map left in the sleaze hotel in the Guatemala City backstreet; the driver of the Mitsubishi jeep who had brought him down country from Flores and dropped him at a roadside kilometre marker; the Indians who worked with him and who had returned to their villages while he was gone to the city.

They had come in the dawn to his place. They had worn army uniforms. He had seen them, out of the corner of his eye, as they had approached the flattened ground where he slept alongside his Indian workers. Raised rifles, the long bursts of firing. Two bodies straddling his. He had spread his fingers, so carefully and such slow movements, into the wet warmth of their running blood and smeared his own chest, his own face. He had lain as dead. They had used crowbars and pickaxes to hack the stela writings from the face walls inside the cave entry of the pyramid. They had grunted, laughed, struggled to heave the slabs with the hieroglyphs away . . . Not daring to move. Cursing the flies that played at his nostrils. Smelling the death against him . . . Everything that could be carried was taken. Everything that he had so lovingly collated was taken. It had been hammered into him by his professor back at the Minnesota campus that he should maintain secrecy on all virgin sites because the dealers in New York paid fat fees for undamaged stelae, no detail of ownership and acquisition required by the clandestine collectors who hid artefacts in secret cellars behind electronic beams. Money talked loud in the world of the private collectors. The Archaeologist despised, more than any persons in the world, the ageing collectors hobbling down cellar steps to view what they should not have owned.

Long after they had gone, he lay motionless in the grass in front of the pyramid.

His father taught school in Ames, and the first weekend in every month his mother did the flowers for church. In his youth and his adulthood he had never struck a fellow human, and he would have hoped that he had never wished hurt to a living person. He had never played football voluntarily, nor baseball, nor hockey. He had no weight to his body, no muscle on his shoulder. No fool and no idiot, he could recognize the deep change that caught at his psychology. It was as if decency had died in him with the murder of the Indians, as if compassion had been extirpated from him with the stealing of the stelae. Just the span of a full day before, he would not have believed it was possible for him to lose decency and compassion. He wanted to strike and to hurt . . .

He wanted to kill . . . He felt no shame in it.

It was the voices that woke Gord. Half up from his sleeping bag and angrily scattering the mosquito net off his face and ready to hiss at them for quiet. He saw them in Jorge’s flashlight. Eff and Vee and Zed were back. The light moved on and there were four men diffidently standing behind them.

It had begun . . .

He turned away from them to regain his sleep.

It had begun, the charge, and in the dawn there would be the first action.

He had no knowledge of them and no hatred of them. Gord watched the young soldiers whose death he had planned.

He tried to think only of the plan.

Zeppo had argued. The pills had constipated his gut. Zeppo had wanted to be forward, and been refused, and had argued that the plan was crap. Eff and Zed and the village recruits they had brought, unknowns, were at the back. Gord had Jorge close to him on the rock mass and Harpo north of the block and Groucho south. They were not to fire until he fired. It was the way he had lectured them. If any of them fired before he fired then he would break that bastard’s neck himself.

They would have wives and mothers and sweethearts. Over the V sight and the needle sight of the machine gun he could follow the soldiers. Two were wrestling in fun in the middle of the road. They were all conscripts, forced men, except for the corporal. Gord had not seen the corporal, and the flap of the tent with the communications radio was not yet opened.

They had done him no harm.

One was on the edge of the tree line, squatting in cover.

They had done him no hurt.

The two who had killed the passenger from the bus were hunched over a low fire and heating a tin.

They had done him no wrong.

The informer, without the hood with the slits, sat in the road, round-shouldered and head down and threw small stones at the spikes of the chain. They were all for killing. One carried back a bucket of water from the dribbling stream on the far side of the road. The call of the birds, in delight at the rising of the sun, was around Gord.