The Fighting Man (1993) (43 page)

‘I don’t know much about keeping the drains clear and making the buses run on time.’

The Fireman shook his head, puzzled. ‘They say that many have asked you why you are here and that you have not answered them. I am a simple man, but I know why I am here. I want to help in the making of a new Guatemala. All of my life this country has been ruled by soldiers. They can do no wrong, they can take what they wish, they can kill whom they please. The army is not trained to defend the sacred frontiers of my country, it is trained to kill its own people, to make war on its brothers and fathers and nephews and sons. I want to be the citizen of a country where it is not the task of the fireman to go out in the mornings and collect the bodies from the ditches, a country where there are no bodies left for a fireman to find. I want a country where my child is educated and my wife has health care, where I have the freedom to voice my opinion to any man without fear of the Death Squads. If that is why you have come, to help me make that country, then I thank you . . .’

Gord said, bleak, ‘I just want to get you to Guatemala City.’

The Fireman dropped back. The wheels of the cart ground behind Gord. He was shouting again, driving and pushing the column faster. A day had been lost. It was the sixth day of Gord’s week. When he looked up he searched the grey lead cloud blanket for breaks and holes and weaknesses. If the weather changed . . . and a day had been lost.

She was the secretary to the production manager of a bottling plant in an industrial estate that was across the tracks of the railway from the Parque Aurora, on the road to the university. It was a good position for her. The job paid well enough for her to own a seven-year-old Renault 5 car. She drove each morning from the old family home to the bottling plant and used the same route because she had no reason not to make a daily pattern. She would have thought it her own secret, dulled by the passage of years. She had been twelve years old when her father had gone. The fast phone call to her mother from her father’s desk at the university, the hastily prepared bag, and his disappearance. The police had come, of course, and rifled the house, and beaten her mother, but it had been eleven years ago. His name was not mentioned in the old family home because her mother would not tolerate hearing the name of her father. She had grown to her womanhood, she had studied, she had been ignored by the authorities. And never a word from her father . . . She knew of the rebellion. The whole of the bottling plant knew of the scale of the revolt, had done since the sales manager had been turned back at a checkpoint on the Quetzaltenango road, told it was too dangerous to travel further. The lieutenant at the checkpoint had been, by chance, the nephew of the immediate neighbour of the sales manager, and the lieutenant had told his uncle’s neighbour that the vermin mob loose in the Cuchumatanes was led by Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez . . . She had shivered in the closet of her secret. Nothing to read of in the newspapers, nothing to hear of in the radio bulletins, but she had trembled at the knowledge that the son of the leader her father had gone to fight with had returned to the high mountains . . . The secret had consumed her the past two days. Each of the past two days her waste basket had been filled with discarded paper littered with her typing errors . . . It happened so fast. The van with the smoked-glass side windows came past her, then swerved to block her. She braked, instinctively, as the men ran from the van towards her.

He tracked the march.

Benedicto held the high ground. He would scramble on the higher ground above the march, then creep with his binoculars to an escarpment or to a break where the big trees had been toppled by the gales, and he would study the march. He looked for the one man.

He had seen the leader, the baby whore Ramírez, at a rest halt in the march, sitting in the middle of a mass of men, seen his face once and fleeting. He had seen the one who mopped his forehead in the photograph, and the one who shook the hand of the baby whore in another photograph.

In the middle of the morning, while on the move and dragging the imbecile with him, he had seen the Englishman with the fire cart. He was not a sniper, did not have a sniper’s rifle, and the sight of the Englishman might have been too fast even for a trained marksman. He tracked the march and searched for the man who held a single flower in the photograph.

He dragged the imbecile after him. He had the imbecile gagged tight across his mouth and he had the imbecile’s hands tied, knotted, and a length of rope to pull him forward.

Pathetic, the imbecile, because he tried always to please . . .

There was a place where Benedicto could see twenty-five paces of the march. It was as Arturo had told it him, and as he had seen at Playa Grande. A rabble mess of men splashing in mud and sliding, slipping, and carrying rifles and machine guns, and some loaded with mortar bombs, and some with rocket launchers hoisted on their shoulders. The gurgling was beside him. A rabble mess crowding forward without shape and discipline. The guttural croak beside him. The eyes of the imbecile begged at him, pathetic . . . He saw the man. The imbecile had identified the man. The man had broken from the column and the man’s hands were already ripping at his belt, and the man was pushing his way into undergrowth.

Benedicto saw the head of the man who held the single flower in the photograph.

He turned to the imbecile and his smile showed his gratitude because he did not wish to bring panic.

He slit the throat, two strokes, of the imbecile who had no further use to him.

Benedicto came down fast from the higher ground above the march.

Sirloin steak meat, twelve-ounce cuts, had been liberated from the refrigerated cupboard of the officers’ kitchen in the garrison’s barracks. Rich meat that had never been affordable in the old quarter of Havana. He had his trousers round his ankles. He supported himself against a tree. He was shielded from the march track by undergrowth. His bowels burst. The wind dribbled from him. The blow from the boot caught him square in the back and he was pitched over and the body was over him and the hand was across his mouth and the knife was against his throat.

‘Go . . .’

He had run from the jeep with the communications equipment, across the tarmac apron, run with the scribbled co-ordinates in his hand to the Huey bird.

‘You have the fix, you have the frequency. Go . . .’

Always the same with a goddamn flier. Arturo had run as fast as his short muscled legs would take him from the jeep to the helicopter, and the flier first pulled out a new stick of gum, then slowly read the paper thrust at him. They were Israelis who had installed the receiver for the beacon signal into the American’s helicopter. The Israelis were the best, Arturo thought. The Israelis were the best because their help came without strings and with enthusiasm. The flier seemed again to scan the figures pencil-written on the paper, then he shrugged and he pulled a map from the pocket above his right knee. Arturo jabbed with his finger onto the map.

‘East of Xecoxol, west of the river. Go . . .’

The flier put the map back in his pocket and dropped the paper wrapping and spat out the new gum. The flier took his pistol from his holster and checked the magazine. Arturo could not know whether it was dumb insolence or whether it was the routine of a flier. The flier waved him away and climbed loosely into the right-hand seat.

The rotors thrashed.

Arturo edged back. The helicopter flew.

The rain beat against his face. He watched as the helicopter merged then disappeared into the mat of the cloud.

‘They have to eat, and the food has to be distributed with discipline . . .’

Gord glowered at Jorge.

‘. . . It is his job to organize the food.’

Jorge shifted on his feet, embarrassed. Harpo and Zeppo were crouched down beside the track and eating their own rations. Not salmon. Christ no, if it had been salmon he would have kicked the tin out of their hands.

‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘You should. And if you didn’t know it there is bloody chaos back there because the food is not being distributed with discipline . . .’

Jorge shrugged.

‘. . . Without discipline we lose time. So, when you find him, will you,
please
, let him know that his job is to get people fed, not just to piss off with a hangover, will you?’

Gord tramped back down the track. The cart and the wheelbarrow were pushed behind him. Not his bloody job to organize the food distribution at the midday rest halt. Back along the track there were cursing crowds of men scrabbling at the food boxes. If they did not have discipline . . . He was halfway back down the column, yelling for the men to form queues for the food distribution, when the helicopter came over them. Gord did not see the helicopter, only heard the thunder reverberate in the cloud cover as it swarmed over him and past him.

It was good gear that the Israeli technicians had put into his Huey bird. It was good gear because it was state-of-the-art Made in the United States of America. It was better gear than had been placed in his Apache when he was flying the Gulf. It was what they always said, the army pilots, the good gear went first to Israel. They had the pick. Fucking Israel was top of the list when it came to the good gear and what was Made in the United States of America went second to his own armed forces. How did fucking Israel pay for the good gear? They paid with what was given them, dollars Made in the United States of America.

He homed in on the growing whine in his ear of the beacon’s signal. Tom could not see the ground, couldn’t see the goddamn hills, nor the goddamn trees, but the beacon pulled him forward. When the beacon whine was continuous, piercing, when the good gear told him that he was directly overhead the signal, he started to flutter down. Going slow, metre by metre, searching the wrapping cloud mass for trees and rock faces.

The curtain around him broke. The good gear had brought him down through the trees into a cleared space that was a hundred metres across.

The skids bumped onto rock. He saw the body. There was the red slash at the throat of the body. He saw the gag in the mouth and the twine on the wrists. The box for the beacon signal, small and black-painted with a stubbed chrome aerial, was beside the body. He kept the rotors going, he was staring around fast beyond where the body lay and then he was aware of the distant scrape of the hatch door behind him. They came in fast.

There was the blurred figure dressed in black and the rope trailed behind him, and then there was the clumsy movement of the pinioned man. Tom was twisted in his seat, straining the tension of his harness, gazing into the fear of the pinioned man. The man had the European look and he had shaved recently, perhaps the day before, but the stubble was grey on his face. Fear in his eyes above the tightness of the gag on his mouth, a laundered uniform from an army barracks with the rank insignia cut off, stumbling in tiredness to lever himself through the hatch and dragged by the rope. He saw the crow’s foot lines at the sides of the eyes, exhaustion. He saw the scrawny thinness of the throat, endurance. He remembered the hospital ward. It was to remember the burned soldiers that he had been taken to the hospital ward. Tom felt no pity for the enemy, stripped of potency. He remembered the flame thrower . . .

Tom lifted the Huey bird out of the clearing. He thought that the prisoner, bound and gagged and in fear, had no call on his sympathy.

Most had been fed, some had not. The march had lost an hour of daylight. Gord drove them on.

The truth was, Percy Martins enjoyed arriving at the new building before the day’s first light had breached the darkness on the Thames. There was, of course, a car to bring him from the suburbs of south-west London. He felt a sense of power and a sense of belonging and a sense of importance, when he clattered his iron-tipped shoes along empty corridors. A few lights burned in the offices occupied by the night shift personnel, but before the crush came to work he was able to settle in his desk chair and dream of what had been . . . A feeble place now, Six, and losing out on Treasury funding to the new people from Five. A pitiful place where the computers dominated and field work was devastated. What he said to his wife, when he had the bloody woman sat down at her needlework and listening, was that if they had had more field work and less computer work tasked to Baghdad, if they had had Percy Martins running the show down there, then they wouldn’t have been caught with their trousers round their knees when little Johnny Saddam had walked into Kuwait . . . She didn’t listen well, his bloody wife.

One of the front desk men brought her to his office.

‘Coffee, yes? Be a good chap, two good coffees, not that machine rubbish . . .’

He felt the front desk men respected him.

She was a fine-looking young woman, just damned tired. He thought the front desk people respected him for a drop of style, and that was in short enough supply in the new Six. A grand-looking young woman and she had driven through the night from Scotland to make the meeting. Hobbes, creepy bugger from Five, had to drive through the night from SW1, two miles maximum and was late. Sod Hobbes . . . He enjoyed working with youth.

‘I’m Parker.’

‘But I’m Percy, and I’m sure you have another name, or is familiarity not allowed these days at Five?’