The Fighting Man (1993) (25 page)

‘Take her in.’

‘What do you reckon . . . ?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘What do you want . . . ?’

‘Get us close.’

‘My ship, my responsibility . . .’

He had hold of the flier’s arm. They bucked in the air. He gripped the flier’s arm and pointed ahead, an order.

‘Close on the camp.’

They came in fast. He thought the flier was combat-experienced. A sharp approach, and then a sudden banking twist that threw him sideways and his weight was held by the shoulder harness. The garrison camp was laid out a hundred feet below him. He saw it all. The flame thrower belched ahead of him and caught one of the two conscripts’ living huts, a great caterpillar of rushing fire. He had the Uzi machine pistol on the webbing belt held across his lap and the helicopter travelled too fast, and his balance was destroyed, and he could not have opened the window flap to shoot down. He saw into the face, for a moment, of the man lying behind the flame thrower’s cart. He saw the machine gunner and the tracer arc that ended against the walls of the NCOs’ and officers’ block where he had slept the one night before the jump-off in Determination ’88. The fire flashes of shooting. Blackened men lying on the open space of the parade area and their bodies convulsed. Tracer rising at them, hunting them. Calm in his ear . . .

‘Receiving fire. We are receiving fire.’

The calm of a combat flier. They were over the edge of the perimeter wire. Ahead of them, Arturo saw the man. The man was caught in the wire, and struggling. The man flailed his arms at the helicopter. It might have been a sledgehammer that smacked the lower fuselage of the helicopter. The bird jolted . . .

‘Taking hits. We are taking hits.’

Seeing the face of the man caught in the coiled razor wire. Recognizing the face and not placing it. Seeing the villa in the suburb of Guatemala City . . . a gardener hosing the flowers, and a guard reading a paper, and a tiled floor swept . . . seeing the face, pleading, of the interrogator from the basement of the villa.

‘Put her down . . .’

‘No fucking way.’

‘Pick him up.’ Shouted into the microphone, yelled at the helmet of the flier.

The calm of the voice in his ear. ‘Forget it, colonel.’

They were gone beyond the perimeter wire. The struggling man in the wire was lost from the side window vision. He strained to see behind him. When he turned, the flier was pointing to the cockpit dials.

The flier’s finger rapped the fuel dial, and the needle was plunging.

The firing had stopped.

Gord stood in the centre of the parade area.

He was numbed, and he held his hands tight on the handle arm of the cart and tried to control the shake of his arms.

To his left, sat on the ground with their hands over their heads, were the prisoners. In front of him, framed against the licking fire of the command building, some charred and some grotesque from shrapnel and bullet wounds, were the bodies. To his right, some lying and some sitting and some standing, were the wounded and a soldier with a red cross on a white arm band moved amongst them. And standing and staring was an indulgence. So tired . . .

‘Jorge, I need the armoury broken open. I need to know every weapon that is available to us. I need to know the ammunition for each weapon.’

He had dismissed him like a boy, and Gord bit on his tongue, but it was done. He saw the anger flare in Jorge but, like a boy, he went as he was ordered.

Zeppo walked to him. Zeppo asked him if he wanted to be shown how to refuel the cart’s tanks.

‘Do it yourself,’ snapped Gord.

Harpo came to him. Harpo grinned and there were cordite stains on the height of his forehead and he carried the machine gun loosely on his shoulder, and Harpo said that he had hit the helicopter, definite.

‘At that height you couldn’t have missed it,’ whipped Gord.

The Archaeologist reached him, red-eyed. A villager was dead. A guerrilla had been hit in the knee cap. A man from the jungle camp was wounded in the pelvis, bad.

‘What did you expect?’ cracked Gord.

The rain sluiced on his face. The rain ran on his cheeks and his nose and his lips . . . The only chance was to make the charge . . . The door of the armoury broke under the weight of the sledgehammer blows. It was as if he alone understood what was their only chance.

‘Jorge, leave that, leave it . . . Get into the village. Do your talking bit. We want men . . . Jorge, we move in an hour.’

He saw Groucho. Groucho skirted the fire of the command building, came from its rear. Funny little bastard. Groucho punched the air, like he’d scored the goal that mattered, like he was a kid. Funny little bastard . . . She was behind him. Zed had a hold of her and supported her. Her face was smoke dark. Groucho led her closer to Gord. She had a split lip, and a closed eye. He felt the weakness in his knees and his weight was taken by the handle of the cart. They were all watching him. They knew what had been his
priority
. He saw the blonde gold of her hair against the mist. The rain beat down. It was the one chance . . .

‘Jorge, we must have men from the village. One hour and we are gone. I want the weapons brought from the armoury. I want any food we can find. I want any radio set. I want medical supplies, bandages. One hour and we move. Get the prisoners back up where we were, get them to carry down our packs. Get . . .’

He saw the wounds on her face.

He asked it of Vee. Would Vee, please, be so kind, a favour to him, run like shit back through the village, back across the fields, back to the tree line, back to the dog. Would Vee bring the dog to Miss Alex Pitt, please.

‘One hour, and we move . . .’

9

The impact, shaking up his spine and wrenching his shoulders against the restraining harness, left him shambling and awkward as he tramped round the bird. Tom passed the Intelligence Analyst who sat with the rain puddles already round his haunches and who seemed to whimper little cries. The Chemist was lying full length, mud-covered, as if the ground was heaven’s bosom. Would have been worse for them because they would only have heard the alarms singing, and the drop before the rotors steadied them would have put their guts into their throats and they wouldn’t have seen the field that he aimed for.

He had feathered the bird onto a cut maize field. Part luck and part skill, he had put down at the higher end of the field that was a small oasis in trees. The lower end would have been wetter, and he had come down hard, and without engine power, and if he had been at the lower end of the field then his skids would have sunk.

If he had had the time, and he hadn’t, then he might just have been proud of the landing.

They might have cleared the garrison camp by a mile. Tom didn’t reckon it was more than that.

It was the first evaluation that was critical, because the first evaluation was about fire. All the way down, the macro-seconds of memory, he had tried to shut the fire fear from his mind. The memory was of a gunship Apache bird, the shudder hit of a shoulder-launched missile, control going and the stick not responding, the fire spreading from the tanks behind the cockpit seat, and the ground rushing to meet him. It was the memory. The fire spreading after landing impact and the heat growing on the harness buckle, and dragging through the window because the door was jammed, and the jagged Plexiglas slashing the side of his face as he had thrown himself clear. It was the memory of the consuming shame of being shot down behind the lines of the enemy, and it was the memory of the blood coming from the wound that ran from his right ear to the line of his jaw . . .

He circled the bird warily.

No fire, no smoke.

Tom went closer to the hull.

All the Huey birds made available to the DEA were dredged from the army’s supplies of obsolete ships. The machine-gun mounts, port and starboard, had been stripped off, and the rocket pods. The armour had been left. On the armour of the hull, underneath the skids, Tom saw the smudges on the high-grade steel where the machine-gun bullets had struck and been deflected. It would have been a one-chance shot. The last of the fuel was dripping down, technicolour in the rain streams. One shit chance, might have been when he had made the evasive banking manoeuvre. One goddamn shit chance. The technicolour trail led up behind the passenger hatch to the fuel tank filler . . . if he had not banked . . . it was a see-through plastic tube, and it was neatly severed.

He climbed back inside the passenger hatch. He picked up two rifles.

‘Heh, don’t you think you’d do better mounting some sort of perimeter watch . . . ?’

He threw a rifle at the Intelligence Analyst, where he sat, and the second rifle towards the Chemist, where he lay. He threw the rifles hard into the field’s mud. He watched them struggle to retrieve the weapons. He started to rout in the maintenance box that was set behind the rear passenger seats. He wanted cutters for the fuel tube, to tidy it, he wanted . . .

He was at the hatch. They were moving drunk slow.

‘Heh, where’s Arturo . . . ?’

Demanding and pushing and bullying, Gord had the weapons out from the armoury. He had the food supplies stacked, he had the medical equipment stowed. He checked his watch. He had said it would be an hour and he would take no delay on the schedule he had made. The fires burned well from the wooden sleeping buildings. He felt the flatness that was always with him after the rushing elation of combat, as it had been in the Gulf and as it had been in Ireland, always the emptiness afterwards. In the radio room, amongst the burned and broken equipment, slumped over it, had been the blackened body of a technician. It was enough for Gord. He drove himself to beat the emptiness with demanding and pushing and bullying.

Fifteen minutes before the withdrawal time, and Groucho was showing him the list, carefully made, of the food supplies and the medical equipment.

‘Fine, get it loaded up . . .’ Gord hustling away.

Ten minutes to the end of his given hour and Zeppo was coming back across the parade area and a trail of men, villagers and jungle people and guerrillas, behind him pushed the cart and a wheelbarrow. Zeppo told him, proud, that the tanks were full, and showed him in the wheelbarrow the oxygen cylinder and the spare jerry cans of fuel and the plastic holders of motor oil. Zeppo was telling him that the cylinder would compress the mixture of fuel and oil for the tubes of the flame thrower.

‘Great . . .’ Gord walking away.

Five minutes before the move out and Harpo was at his side and reciting the inventory of rifles and machine guns, loose ammunition and belt ammunition, and mortars and sub-machine guns, and what it would weigh and how many men would be needed to carry the extra weight.

‘I want it all, down to the last bullet . . .’ Gord striding away.

The Archaeologist sat amongst the piled heap of the backpacks and tightened the laces on new and shined army boots.

‘It’s not my business, sir, but may I tell you that if you continue to try to push men then, and I’ll be very sorry if it happens, all they’ll want is to see you fall flat on your pretty face. No offence.’

Gord went by him.

It was three minutes to the hour when Gord heard the singing. They were coming up the hill from the village. It was like a marching song. There were the children in front and at the side of the column of men. The children darted and ducked and ran and skipped ahead of and beside the column.
Butterflies
. . . As if it were a carnival for the children . . . And around the men were Eff and Vee and Zed who worried at the edges of the column. He counted thirty-one men. Behind the column, behind the butterflies, he saw Jorge. The young man walked with Alex Pitt, and the dog was beside her. He could not hear what she said, but her fingers jerked into Jorge’s chest as if to reinforce the ferocity of her argument. Behind the column, behind the butterflies, behind Jorge and Alex Pitt, a crowd of women trailed. There were weapons to be gathered, handed down by Harpo. There were the big cardboard cartons of food and medical supplies, allocated by Groucho. There were the metal boxes of ammunition to be loaded onto shoulders. Gord was jockeying them, chivvying them, calling for speed and his watch hands had already slipped away from the hour that he had allowed, and the temper was rising in him. She stood by the gate with the women and her eyes seemed to follow him and accuse him.

They left the camp behind them, and they left the prisoners sitting in the parade area with the wounded. Amongst the army wounded were their own.

They were across the first field beyond the camp perimeter when she caught him. The forward men of the march were near to the tree line. She ran, she slipped in the loose ploughed mud of the field, she pushed herself up and ran again. She caught him and the rain streaked the hair across her face.

She shouted at him. ‘For God’s sake, do you know what you are doing?’

‘I know exactly what I am trying to do.’

‘Those men you’ve hijacked, they’re innocents . . .’

He kept on moving for the tree line.

‘. . . You’re taking them to their deaths . . .’

She had washed the smoke grime from her face.