The Fighting Man (1993) (41 page)

The Ambassador intoned, ‘Good to see you, Schultz. Sorry about the hour but crisis rarely comes convenient . . . The place is falling apart, fast. Santa Cruz del Quiché has gone. I won’t beat round it. What stands between this rabble mob and Guatemala City is the Kaibil battalion. We want the Kaibiles to win. We want this rabble mob broken, turned, and hit so as they never are able to regroup. The fact that a pitiful Congress back home denigrates the government of Guatemala at every turn precludes me from helping these people in their hour of need but, and I stress, the interests of the United States are best served by the survival of the government. Anyone thinking this rabble mob is the route to a better society has gone apeshit. I’m getting there, the success of the Kaibil battalion is critical to us. There is a new commanding officer for the battalion and he has made one request of us. He has asked for you. You are seconded to his command. Wait on, Schultz, don’t go breathing hard at me, it has been cleared with State and with DEA. They want you and we’re giving you to them. The quicker the killing is done the happier we shall be. Got me, Schultz . . . ?’

He rocked. ‘And if I . . . ?’

The Country Attaché murmured, ‘You’ll be on the next bus north, up the Highway, up the Pan American, and don’t be looking for a future.’

Kramer said, ‘You’re a servant of the American people. The American people want
stability
in this crap yard.’

The Country Attaché murmured again, ‘We’ll have it over these bastards here, and it’ll be milked, we’ll have gratitude and co-operation as long as I’m above ground.’

Kramer said, ‘Just help to blow away that murderer with the flame thrower.’

‘Go to work, Schultz, and go to work good.’ The Ambassador stood his full height.

‘. . . I don’t know what had happened to him, Cathy – you don’t mind if I call you Cathy? – I don’t know because he never bothered to tell me, but when he came up here he was a man with trouble on his back. He was army, wasn’t he? He was something in one of those flash outfits, wasn’t he? He was an officer, wasn’t he? He came with trouble . . . I asked myself, what’s a Para or whatever doing in this bloody place. I asked him enough times, and I never had the answer. It was like it was private trouble and not to be shared. He worked at the farm as if it was
important
. Of course it wasn’t important. I work hard, he made me seem bloody lazy, Cathy. He had trouble on his back and a short-fuse temper. You shouldn’t mix it with him, not when he’s the temper up . . . These three gooks came for him, and they came with all the photographs of bodies and kiddies cut up, and I was arsing them, I was pretending I was him, big laugh, and when he had enough of the laugh he just told me to get myself lost. I did. Look, Cathy, I’m a hell of a lot heavier than Gord, I can look after myself. I went meek as a wee lamb. You don’t cross him, not when he’s the temper up . . . There were three lads crossed him. They were from Tyneside and they came up here to do the eagles’ nest on Sidhean Mor. If Gord had any relaxation it was going out where it was wild, and climbing and lying up, suppose that was his training, to watch the nest, see how the eggs were. Not disturbing them, never closer than a couple of hundred yards and he’d go up in the dawn light and come back in the dusk light. I reckon those big buggers would have known he was there, bloody good eyes they’ve got, but he wasn’t a threat to them. These three lads came for the eggs. I heard what happened from the district nurse, because one of the lads told her. They were coming up near the nest and they must have nearly walked over him. You get a good price for eagles’ eggs and these lads weren’t going to back off just because there’s a joker up in the rocks who tells them it’s better if they turn round and disappear. There were three of them and they must have rated their chances. Fair do to him, Cathy, he helped them down. He had to help them down because one of them had a dislocated shoulder and one of them had a broken nose with concussion and the last had balls the size of oranges after the kicking they got. It was the only time I know of, Cathy, when the fuse blew on him . . . I am not good with words, not at explaining. I’ll put it to you this way. He was like a lost man when he was here, like a man wanting to find something. Does that sound prat rubbish, Cathy? He didn’t find anything, other than the times he was up Sidhean Mor with those big bugger birds, until the three gooks came for him. I reckoned he’d been running up till the time they came for him, and they showed up and he stopped running . . . The pictures they brought, Cathy, they’d have turned a hard man . . .’

The salmon farm labourer reached for his wallet and the diminishing fold of notes made from the sale of Gord Brown’s wheels. She shook her head and the gold hair of Cathy Parker sheened in the low light of the hotel bar. She made her excuses, said she was driving back to London through the night. Before she left the bar she paused to gaze up at the stuffed majesty of an eagle, then ducked her head and went out into a still and clear night. Rocky walked her to the car.

‘. . . I suppose he went there, yes, of course he did. I suppose he’s making waves there. I said he was running, but I don’t reckon after those photographs of blood and bodies and kiddies cut up that he’ll want to run any more. Not unless he’s won, he won’t run out of there. Been good meeting you, Cathy.’

The queues were already forming outside the embassy for the opening of the visa section, the damp light was growing, and the men who would hire their services with old typewriters were setting up their pitches under high umbrellas.

The gate was edged open for Tom by a marine guard.

The jeep was parked on the kerb.

The colonel sat impassive beside his driver.

Tom slung his kitbag into the back of the jeep and climbed after it. He was jerked down onto a hard seat as the jeep powered away.

The jeep went through the grey-lit city. The colonel ignored him, studied a mass of papers that were protected from the rain by cellophane sleeves.

A barrier was raised for them.

The jeep parked outside the military hospital, and Arturo jerked his thumb for Tom to follow. They ran past two lorries in army camouflage that were being hosed down and scrubbed clean.

The ward was filled. Each bed was taken. There were mattresses laid out in the central aisle. There was a scream from a bed, and a moan from another, and a sobbing cry from a mattress. The nurses hurried on silent rubber-soled shoes, and the doctors lingered over beds and mattresses and their hanging white coats were blood-stained and showed the dark marks of charred burning. Tom hesitated by the door of the ward, beside the big heap of stinking uniforms, and Arturo from the middle of the aisle demanded with an impatient sweep of his arm that Tom follow him. The nurses and doctors were around him with the saline drips and the swabs and the syringes of morphine. He forced himself to look. He saw the dog-quiet eyes of men in shock from pain, and the trembling of the arms of men in shock from fear, and the eyes were diamonds in the blackness of a scorched face and the arms were dark stumps where the skin had bubbled in heat. The scream became a rattle and the rattle was lost and a sheet was pulled over the head of a man and the nurses pushed the bed on its wheels out through the swing door at the far end of the ward. He made himself look. Arturo covered the length of the ward, did not speak to a doctor nor to a nurse nor to a burned soldier. His boots smacked back over the length of the aisle. Tom followed him out.

He understood the fire.

He knew the wounds that the fire made and the terror that it brought.

He felt the cold of the rain and the wind as they returned to the jeep. It was about family. It was family that he searched for. He had not found the family in the DEA community working out of the Guatemala City embassy, because there he was just the ferry man who did the lifts. And he had not found the family in the military where the regimen of promotion crawling and camaraderie bonding suffocated him. Nor had he found the family at what had once been home. There had been a teacher, far back, who had been the nearest thing to family. The teacher had driven him through the grades to college, and been around to pressure him through the exams for the military. The teacher was dead, cancerous lungs. The teacher had died the month that he had travelled to Fort Wolters. He thought it was because he had never known it that he cared so much about finding family. And he wondered if he might just be finding family in a ward for burns casualties . . .

Tom grasped Arturo’s shoulder. The anger bit in him. ‘I didn’t need to be told. I didn’t need to be given a show at the theatre. My orders are to help you to hunt him down and to kill him, the man with the fire . . .’

With the first light coming the hunger gnawed in the stomach of the Civil Patroller. Through the night, watching over Gaspar the spirit and the woman who had gone to him, his gut had groaned for food. He could see the white body of Gaspar the spirit and he could see the woman sitting close to it, and they were protected well enough by the Fireman and the gringos from America and Canada and the Priest and the Street Boy from Guatemala City. He whispered that he would go to look for food. What he hoped to find, what he had dreamed of in the half-sleep through the night, were fresh-made tortillas with beans and chilli and perhaps some rice, and better if he could wash the rawness from his throat with
atol
, and not bad if he could find warm Coca Cola. The dream of the food was fanciful to him, the food that he ate on the few days a year when he went to the festivals in Uspantán and Sacapulas. The dream was of enchiladas and guacamole with mashed avocado, and
ceviche
which was marinated raw fish. He told the men in the group that he would go to look for food and he thought that each of them felt the hunger. He took the rifle with him that he had been given and started back towards the town. He did not see the shadow movement. He did not cry out as the shadow movement closed on him, took him. The thoughts of the tortillas and warm Coca Cola were shredded from his mind. He did not cry out as he felt the knife against his throat and the stale breath against his nose because he believed that to have cried out would have lessened his chance of survival.

The older ones would have known him.

The older NCOs and some of the officers at platoon or company level would have remembered Mario Arturo from Victory ’82 and Firmness ’83. He searched among the faces for those who had been with him in the triangle and in the Ixcán, and those who had paraded with him on the Campo de Marte on Army Day, before he had gone to lecture at the Escuela Politecnica, before he had gone to the staff at the
estado mayor
, before the shit job of liaison with the drugs hunters. They were the best, he felt the pride.

‘What does a Kaibil eat?
flesh
. . .’

He stood on an overturned orange box. He let the roar chant wash over him.

‘What kind of flesh?
human
. . .’

The American was behind him. The officers of the battalion were below him. The chant was for him.

‘What kind of human flesh?
communist
. . .’

They were in front of him. Their boots made the hammered accompaniment to the chant.

‘What does a Kaibil drink?
blood
. . .’

The rain lashed at his face and ran on the webbing that harnessed him and dripped from the barrel of the Uzi slung from a shoulder strap.

‘What kind of blood?
human
. . .’

He looked over the brightness of their faces and the tautness of their bodies and into the strength of their eyes.

‘What kind of human blood?
communist
. . .’

He hushed them and then he called them forward. There was the crush of men around the upturned orange box. He told them of Santa Cruz del Quiché and Nebaj and Playa Grande. He told them that some units of the army had surrendered and that some had run away and that some had refused to march. He told them of the fire and of oil mixed with gasoline to hold better to an arm or a body or a face, the cocktail that clung. He told them of the hospital where the burned and the maimed lay in their agony. He told them of a rabble crowd that came towards Guatemala City. He stood erect on the overturned orange box and he had no need to shout because they hung on him in silence.

‘. . . It is the Kaibiles that stand between our beloved country and the dark age of disaster. This is what I promise you. We will find the rabble crowd, we will block them, when we have blocked them we will turn them, when we have turned them we will destroy them. That is my promise. We will find them and we will kill them . . .’

They cheered him, they called his name.

He stepped down.

He walked to the American.

He saw the droll smile, mocking. ‘Brave words.’

‘You should be ready to fly.’

‘Where?’

‘Where I tell you to fly, when I tell you to fly.’

‘If you say so, colonel.’

He looked at the skies, into the leaden cloud mass.

‘. . . Let me tell you what I was once told, by the British Military Attaché up from Panama. It was the situation in Ireland and the subversives attempted to assassinate the government of Britain, and the bomb did not work as lethally as intended. The subversives, afterwards, issued a statement. “You have to be lucky every time, we have to be lucky once.” The baby whore Ramírez and the Englishman, they have to be lucky every time, we have to be lucky only
once
. We need to block them only once, fight them once, defeat them once, and they are broken.’