The Fighting Man (1993) (38 page)

If the Englishman could not go on . . .

He would have liked Gord to have known that favourite student, who marched in demonstrations, who had been taken, tortured, killed.

They started down again.

Too steep a track for him, for any of them, to support Gord as they went down.

The man needed to rest, had given too much. There would be no rest. When they came down from the mountain slope they would hit Santa Cruz del Quiché, night attack, they would bring the fire to the garrison town that was the departmental capital. And he had heard, Gord’s last muttering, like there was a madness, that it was the fourth day of his week.

When they came down from the slope, they would be four miles from Santa Cruz del Quiché.

He vowed to himself that he would be beside Gord through the night, as he had been beside him in the battle for Nebaj. It was only if he were beside Gord that he would not feel the terror in battle.

Driving on, scrambling and sliding down the slope . . .

He shook his head, he played at astonishment.

‘You’ve had
nothing
from London . . . ?’

The grade 3 staffer said, ‘They have a man in there making havoc, and not the courtesy of an acknowledgement.’

The Assistant Under Secretary said, waspish, ‘You get sweet fuck from them unless it suits. I want to know who he is, how he craps, what hand he wipes his ass with. I want to know about this jerk. I want him stopped before the damage is outside limitation. Don’t ask a second time,
demand
. Action . . .’

The modern town of Santa Cruz del Quiché was built beside the former capital of the Quiché Indians, destroyed by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524.

A swollen town that day, the population of eight thousand souls was weighted by the Indian collaborators and the
Ladinos
fleeing into the safety of the garrison perimeter. The plaza in front of the church, built by the Dominicans with stone from the Quiché capital, was a crush of refugees fleeing ahead of the rumour of fire.

There were many with cause for fear because the modern town of Santa Cruz del Quiché had been, a decade before, the hunting ground for the soldiers and the torturers and the Department of Technical Investigations. The rumour said that the fire was coming, and the rumour also said that the fire was blocked beyond the Rio Negro. The bulging town waited for news that was more than rumour.

‘. . . We came out, Miss Parker, on an American transport chopper, a CH-47, that’s a Chinook if you don’t know. We were four men because one had been case-vacked, and one had stomach trouble. We’d got rid of them and we had to walk another couple of days before anyone else had the time to pick us up. We knew what had happened at Karbala when we were picked up, a pocket radio job. We knew that the ’Raq armour had gone back into the place. It would have been a knife into butter business because they had nothing to protect themselves with, not against tanks. We’d seen what the ’Raqs had done to the Shia people before, we’d been in the police barracks where they did the executions and where they did the torture. I wouldn’t say any of us felt good about what we heard, but Mr Brown took it worse than the rest of us. He was very quiet that last day while we were waiting at the LZ for the chopper . . . We were picked up. They were all American on the Chinook and to them it had been a great victory. Mr Brown didn’t see it their way, they really pissed him off because they were larking about in the chopper. Wasn’t their fault, they were just kids, but they were right under his skin. We flew into Dhahran. You have to understand, Miss Parker, that we had been away for more than six weeks. We hadn’t washed properly in six weeks, not changed our fatigues, not shaved. We must have looked like we came out of the Ark. That’s just so as you understand better what happened. We put down at the Dhahran base. There was a scramble from these Americans to get off, I reckoned that some of them had been out in the sand for at least forty-eight hours and they seemed to rate that as a real survival effort. There was a brigadier general there to meet them. They paraded for him, pretty sloppy I thought, but that was the form, and he shook each one’s hand. It was all happy time and the war was over and everyone was going home, and the job had been done. Well, at least, these Americans thought the job had been finished. Am I going on, Miss Parker? He hadn’t said anything in the chopper. He was just brooding . . . God knows what we looked like when we walked off the Chinook. We were filthy, we smelled and we thought we had failed. He was last off. The brigadier general saw us, and it would have tickled him to meet some Special Forces people. He wasn’t Special Forces oh no . . . He might have been transport, or tank recovery, or the guy who puts shower units in for the base camps behind the front line. He looked the sort who hadn’t made a bigger decision in the war than whether to have fried chicken or boiled chicken for his tea. He was turned out really smart, all the creases right and he had a little pistol on his hip that a woman would have put in her handbag. Mr Brown came off the Chinook and the rest of us were belting for the bus. It was Mr Brown that the brigadier general caught. Actually, Miss Parker, it was really rather funny . . .

‘This was how it went . . .

‘The brigadier general shouted, “Well done, soldier, you have played your part in the destruction of tyranny . . .” That sort of rubbish.

‘Mr Brown looked him up, looked him down, like he was dirt. Mr Brown said, “Bullshit . . .” Straight at his face.

‘Mr Brown kept on walking. The brigadier general, red like scarlet, not the sun, was bawling after him, telling him to come back, telling him to stand up straight, telling him he was a disgrace. Mr Brown never said another word, just ignored him. The brigadier general could have let it go, didn’t. Mr Brown could have apologized, but he didn’t. The brigadier general was running after him, and the doors of the bus closed and the guy was beating on the windows. By the time the bus was at the big building there were military police there. There was no way he was going to apologize, and no way that brigadier general wasn’t going to have his pint of blood. It was all round the camp in an hour, that a Brit had told an American brigadier general he was talking bullshit . . . It didn’t have to happen, Miss Parker, but my Mr Brown is a hell of a cussed sort of man . . . He could have apologized and he didn’t. It’s a sort of self-destruct. They broke him for that bloody cussedness . . .’

The former sergeant escorted Cathy Parker from his small office at the back of the premises of a firm that specialized in providing rural security to the owners of shooting moors and fishing rivers. They paused on the pavement of the London street.

‘I’m sorry for interrupting you, Zachary, I appreciate your help.’

‘Please, Zed, what he always called me . . . Has he hooked onto another group of no-hopers? You wouldn’t tell me, would you? Nice to meet you, Miss Parker.’

The colonel toured the town in his jeep. His driver nudged through the narrow and crowded streets of Santa Cruz del Quiché, hooting, forcing the refugee mass to divide. He commanded a battalion-strength force of infantry, with the support of heavy mortars, recoilless, and armoured cars. He could sense the fear in the streets, and he could sense also the resentment of many of the Quiché people. The fear in the faces of the
Ladinos
and the resentment in the faces of the Indians.

He toured the town to check the siting of the mortars and the recoilless weapons, and the fields of fire given to the machine guns, and the platoon positions and section responsibilities. He could not know how his men would fight . . . The colonel could expect no reinforcements, he had been told over the radio, but then intelligence had told him that an attack was not yet imminent. Intelligence talked of the Rio Negro obstacle, and the radio talked of great trees felled across the road from Joyabaj and the road from Sacapulas and the road from Momostenango and the road from Guatemala City. He had heard that the attack, when it came, would be spearheaded by fire.

‘Well, you’ll just have to tell them, Mr Martins, that they’ll have to wait. They may not be familiar with having to wait, but they’ll bloody well have to start learning . . .’

Hobbes boiled into the telephone. He could imagine the opinionated, self-satisfied, under-achieving Percy Martins sitting in that monstrosity of a building by the Thames and jumping to a signal from the bloody Americans. And arrogant, all of them at Six, since they had moved into that monstrosity, green jelly and yellow blancmange like the sort of Sunday pudding his mother made. A monstrosity fit to house monsters of incompetence, in Hobbes’ view.

‘. . . We do have other things at Five to concern us, business other than the activities of one man on the other side of the world. I have a very good young lady on it . . . Yes, young lady. We employ young ladies at Five, perhaps you don’t at Six. Try it. They have a pair of tits and a fanny, and they work rather well, if you didn’t know . . . When she has completed her report it will be forwarded to you. So just tell your bloody Americans to get out of our hair,
please
.’

He slapped the telephone down.

It was the start of his day, bad and angry. The call would set the tone for the day. He could analyse the anger. It was a lie that he was busy. To pretend that his desk was cluttered with matters of greater importance was at best a half-truth. He was off Ireland. The new regime at Five had swept the Ireland Desk clean. He had very little to concern himself with and there was the growing worry that an idle hand might just be selected for the compulsory redundancy, the sack, the boot, that lay as a shadow across so many of them . . . Fliss had been to Guatemala. Soon after they were married, before the children came, with a girlfriend, his wife had travelled to Guatemala. She had come back with a strain of gastroenteritis that had cut her down for three weeks, and she had come back with stories told her by aid workers and priests that were foul in the telling.

He might, that evening, break his own house rule, and over supper tell his Fliss about a man who was leading a revolt in the highlands of Guatemala . . . He was a civil servant. He was a government man. He knew about holiday charts and the pension scheme and expenses chits, and covert action in government’s name. He doubted, if the redundancy note came, that he could swim in the rivers of free enterprise, not massive scope there for the skills of covert action. Thank God, thank whoever smiled down on him, that he had insisted the awful ‘Bren’ should write, in his own fair hand, No Further Action on the report concerning Brown, Gordon Benjamin. Staring down at an empty desk, sitting in a silent room, he thought of the man who had brought revolution to Guatemala . . . lucky bastard.

A town of strangers’ faces. A town of unknown men. A town of the whispered and secret word that was beyond the hearing of the
orejas
, the informers. A town where, as the darkness came from the dusk, knives were sharpened on stone, and axes were taken from the hidden places in the roofs of the shanty homes, and bottles were filled with petrol and corked with cloth. A town that breathed the mood of vengeance. A town where the son of the whore Ramírez huddled anonymous under a tent blanket amongst the refugees on the plaza. A town in waiting for a signal.

Bursts of firing and the thud of the mortars’ bombs and the rich light of the machine guns’ tracer, and the snake of the cart’s flame.

The tiredness had gone from Gord.

Chaos in the town of Santa Cruz del Quiché. A pandemonium of screaming and stampeding people. Oscar led by Eff. Roger guided by Vee. Delta shown the way by Zed. The darkness around Gord, saving him and clinging to him, the darkness broken by the flame running from the cart in pursuit of the fuel cascade.

The dusk had settled when they had met Eff and Vee and Zed sitting patiently beside the track, and the fast briefing on the situation in the town and the layout of the defences. Their crying laughter and their hanging on Gord’s neck and chuckling their excitement, and their wanting to be praised.

God alone knew how much they should have been praised . . . A town too large to have a secure perimeter of defence, a town around which the roads had been cut and blocked by fallen trees, a town into which an enemy could be guided.

She had brought the dog with her. He had not argued, the anticipation of combat surging in him. She had come with his group, and brought the damn dog.

They had infiltrated the town. They had become a part, in the fading light, of the fleeing mass reaching the town for safety. Not using the roads that led into the town from Joyabaj and Sacapulas and Momostenango and Guatemala City, but coming through houses and skirting the blocks and coming in the narrow mud lanes between the shanty homes and avoiding the check-points.

The signal had been given . . .

Oscar had isolated the villa and office complex of the military governor, kept a bullet rain on the buildings until Gord had reached them with the fire and burned the heart out of the defence. Roger had reached the old Spanish colonial facade of police headquarters, pinned down the sniping retreat of the commanders and interrogators and detectives until Gord had come with the fire and made a torch hell for them. Delta had identified two machine-gun positions, the one under the great bell in the tower of the church, and the other on the flat roof of the school block, and the two machine guns had been blasted until Gord had come with the fire to scourge them down. They went where they heard the firing in its ferocity. Dark and narrow streets, the lights shot out, shadows thrown by the fire from the flame thrower on the cart. The group was around him. The exhilaration took him. Not people, that the flame took, but
objectives
. Not men, that the flame destroyed, but
targets
. He was a man lifted by the drug of killing and the narcotic of going forward. The tongues of the fire were about him, climbing and licking in the roofs and rampaging in the old wood. The town was taken. There was the great surge towards the fence and the gatehouse of the garrison’s barracks. It was the force that the flame from the cart had unleashed, rabid in hatred. The mob was around him, driving him forward, and the Academic was tugging at his arm to hold him back, and the Fireman was yelling at him. He turned. She was behind him, dragged by the leashed dog. He turned and the Fireman was screaming and pointing down at the cart as the body mass broke over them. Needing to fill the tanks. Having to replace the fuel oil under compression in two of three tanks. The mob going forward and the Academic was swept past him. The Archaeologist was pushing the cart and the Priest pulling it into an entry alley between two buildings of lichen-covered stone, the Civil Patroller behind him with the wheelbarrow.