The Fighting Man (1993) (49 page)

The going of the helicopter, like a liberation, spurred them.

He went with Groucho. Groucho had the burden of the last RPG-7 rocket launcher, and the last mortar, and the rockets and the bombs, and he had the weight of the last of the food. They were going faster again, and strung out, and Gord was at the back of the march with Groucho.

There was the anguish on Groucho’s face and the misery of his dropped head.

‘It’s not your fault . . .’

He tried to break the anguish.

‘. . . It is nobody’s fault . . .’

He tried to hack the misery.

‘. . . We tried.’

The anguish and the misery were turned on Gord.

Groucho sobbed. ‘You do not understand. You understand nothing. You do not understand their power. You understand nothing of their cruelty. They have made a country of terror. You do not understand the terror that makes a man turn against his friend, against his family, against his God. You understand nothing . . .’

The beacon signal was fading.

He had tapped at his watch and indicated the needle of the fuel gauge, and the colonel had nodded. They had banked away.

Tom took the new course. He navigated from the map in the plastic-fronted pocket above his knee. The rendezvous for the fuel load was marked on the map, midway between Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiché, a red crayon cross where the road tanker would be. Arturo was bent over his own map and was on his own radio link. Arturo’s attention was taken with the staccato instructions he was giving over the radio for the movement of the battalion and the position reports he was receiving.

The two faces were seared in Tom’s mind.

It was easy flying, a bright afternoon and horizon visibility.

There was the face of the man that he had seen beside the casevac helicopter, clean-shaven, and the droll smile and the meaningless mutter of ‘. . . See you some day. You never know, it’s a small world. Take care.’ The face of a man that was Gord . . .

He saw the lone figure on the tarmacadam road.

. . . There was the face of the man that he had seen in the middle of the parade ground at Playa Grande, from 100 feet, from the grime of the cockpit window, the face with the ragged beard of the man who lay behind the flame-thrower cart that spat the fire towards the command building. The face of the man that was Gordon Benjamin Brown.

A solitary figure, what they called ICI in DEA speak, Caucasian, white male, blue jeans and red shirt, medium height, slight build. And waving, frantically waving.

Tom nudged Arturo’s elbow and pointed down, and Arturo was giving out the co-ordinates for the troop move, getting the block forces up for the morning, and because he had been interrupted, distracted, Arturo had to call the last co-ordinates again . . . The man was waving. Cheeky damn guy, waving and pointing down to the tarmac road ahead, like he was flagging a cab. The faces slipped. The faces of Gord and Gordon Benjamin Brown faded. A hell of a cheek for the guy to wave him out of the sky like he was a yellow cab and it was raining and he was late home for his dinner. He said to Arturo that it wouldn’t affect the fuel, and it wouldn’t delay them. He brought the bird down towards the road.

He hovered above the guy.

The guy was early, middle, thirties, and scrawny so that the red shirt billowed on him. The guy had big spectacles, twisted askew, on his face. He was looking at the guy and the thought came fast to him that this was bad country to be on the ground without protection. Either in fast and lift him, or out fast without him.

He set the Huey down on the skids.

Good guy, didn’t mess him. Ran fast for the hatch and had it back and was inside and was slamming the hatch shut.

Tom powered the bird up, dragged the stick back. He took her up to cruising altitude, then turned and pointed to the headset that was hung on the bulkhead behind him, and when the guy had it on then Tom gestured on his own headset to the microphone button. The guy looked laid out, like there was nothing left in him . . . He showed Arturo what he was doing, pressing the switches that isolated the colonel and his ground communication.

‘You looked like you were anxious for a ride.’

‘Grateful, I’m very grateful . . .’

‘American?’

‘Archaeologist, out of the University of Minnesota. It’s a hell of a kindness. Are you embassy . . . ?’

‘Sort of.’

‘I didn’t know we had advisers down here, thought that was off limits.’

‘DEA. It’s complicated . . . So, where you coming from?’

‘An archaeological site, a dig site.’

‘Where’s that?’

The voice in Tom’s ear. ‘Up the road.’

‘Where?’

‘A bit up the road.’

‘Whereabouts up the road?’

The pause in Tom’s ear. A hesitation. ‘Some miles up the road, on a dig site.’

‘How long you been walking?’

‘A few days.’

‘Shit, man, I thought you’d been walking since morning . . . How many days?’

‘Just a few days . . .’

‘Don’t get me wrong, but this isn’t exactly vacation hiking country. What takes you walking a few days in the middle of this shit place?’

The longer pause in Tom’s ear. The longer hesitation. ‘I was working on this site. I was attacked. I was studying the artefacts. I log them, quite legally. I was hit by thieves. They sell big in New York . . . I was trying to get out.’

‘And you have just been
walking
. . . ?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘From “a bit up the road” and “just for a few days”? Friend, you’ve a hell of a way with conversation. Where you heading?’

‘I was trying to get out. I want La Aurora. Can you help me get to La Aurora?’

‘Do you know what’s going on in this country, “a bit up the road”?’

‘I don’t, no.’

‘You know what’s been happening, “just for a few days”?’

‘I don’t, no.’

Tom said, steel, ‘A bit of a rebellion, just an insurrection . . . You didn’t hear?’

‘No.’

Tom saw below him the road tanker parked, tiny, and there were jeeps and lorries around it. He cut his microphone switch. He started the descent. He was concentrating. There were telephone wires alongside the road. He came down into the dirt swell. The rotors’ draught threw mud and stones across the road, against the road tanker and the lorries. They touched down. It was a piss poor landing. It was the sort of landing that would have won him a tongue lash from an instructor of novice recruits at the Army Primary Helicopter School. He cut the engine.

He told the Archaeologist, ‘Get out, get over there . . .’

He pointed away behind the lorries.

He supervised the refuelling.

Tom watched the guy. The guy was going from jeep to lorry and last to the driver of the road tanker.

Tom walked sharply from the helicopter and round the far side of the road tanker. The money was being passed. Real money, dollars Made in the United States of America. The driver took the money. Tom ducked away.

He was standing beside the helicopter.

The guy came to him.

‘I just wanted to thank you.’

‘No problem. When are you hoping to go?’

‘First flight out.’

Said easily, conversation, ‘How’s he doing, how’s Gord?’

‘Who?’

Tom looked into the guy’s eyes and they wavered, and they dropped. ‘How’s he doing, Gordon Benjamin Brown?’

‘I don’t know what you’re . . .’

‘May I tell you something . . . You are the worst fucking storyteller I ever met. You made a good decision, bunking out. Gord, he’ll be cold dead tomorrow, Gordon Benjamin Brown. Friend, you made the right move. Have a good flight, and give my love to Minnesota . . .’

When the bird was fuelled, just before he lifted for the late afternoon trawl to rope in the beacon signal, he watched the road tanker drive away for Guatemala City and the military corner of La Aurora. He waved to the guy who said he was an archaeologist, to the guy running out on Gord, who had saved his life, the same Gordon Benjamin Brown who would be ambushed and killed in the morning.

‘Are you never there? . . . Is it that you just leave it on even when you’re there? . . . We’ve moved a body in from Panama where we staff . . . Seems to have his ear to the ground . . . It’s desertion time, the faint-hearted are quitting in droves. The military reckon to take them tomorrow. The unit involved is called the Kaibil battalion. I’m told we should respect them, they would be expected to get a good result. It’s just a small group that’s left and it is likely to be rather surgical . . . Sorry about that . . .’

She sat alone on the bed of her flat. Cathy Parker drank from the neck of the bottle.

They could not have given him more help.

He had pitched up on the secure side of La Aurora, into a mêlée of military activity. The fixed-wing Cessnas were being fuelled and armed under lights. Helicopters were ferrying sticks of men and their battle weapons out into the darkness of a still and star-struck night. A sergeant took the Archaeologist from the aviation fuel depot, where the road tanker dropped him, to an officer. The driver of the road tanker had given him the name of Colonel Mario Arturo, and he had used the name effortlessly. The officer drove him to the civilian terminal. The Archaeologist could see they had won.

The military ruled and the civilian staff grovelled. The officer took him to the head of the queue for the Continental flight to Houston. He paid AmEx plastic. The way he said it, he was the friend of Colonel Mario Arturo, and the officer escorted him from the ticket desk to the passport control. He produced his passport, moulded from his hip pocket into the shape of his buttock cheek, and wet from jungle rain and now dried stiff. The state of his passport was not questioned because he had the officer with him, and he was the friend of Colonel Mario Arturo.

He went through after he had thanked the officer and shaken his hand and managed a smile of gratitude. He was saluted.

When the Continental flight landed from Houston, the Archaeologist watched it disgorge. They were coming back to their own. The women and their children swarmed from the aircraft steps and across the floodlit tarmac. He thought of the Mayan women, and their children that Gord called the ‘butterflies’. The women from the plane wore their fur coats and their silk scarves and their designer suits. He thought of the Mayan women and their children who would be slogging cross-country back to their villages. The women from the plane carried their jewel boxes and their Paris bags. He thought of the Mayan women and their children going back, stoic, to their villages to await the counterstrike and retribution. The women from the plane wore thick lipstick and loud powder, and their children carried the presents bought in the shopping malls of Houston. He thought of the Mayan women and their children returning to their villages to face the vengeance that had been their fate since the spear of Alvarado was stuck in the guts of Tecún Umán. The women from the plane and their children were met by a river flow of generals and politicians and brigadiers and civil servants and colonels and captains of industry . . . The bastards had won.

He was against the full-length window. It was seven hours after he had left the march, bunked out on Gord, and the young woman and her dog, and Jorge and his crowd, that the Continental flight was called. In his mind was the fire from the cart that was rusty and bent and bruised. His breath blurred the glass.

He said it out loud, but quiet, ‘Burn them, Gord, burn them fucking hot . . .’

The Archaeologist could not help himself. He wept as he walked to the aircraft.

They did not tack right and left. They took the line of the compass. They did not swerve east and west. Straight ahead on the luminous line of the compass needle. Gord had told them what he hoped for. Like those who thrash in drowning, the energy flooded back in them. Like men and women who will flail with their arms to the exhaustion point towards a floating raft, they blundered on the path given them by the compass needle. The name of the place at the end of the path of the compass needle was Canillá. It was two full days’ walk away.

Struggling when they were against the gradient, running when they were going down. Gord had the cart and Alex was with him. The dog moaned in hunger beside her, and the Street Boy wheezed as he struggled to propel the wheelbarrow. She helped him when she could. She forced back the clawing undergrowth when the prick barbs caught in his clothes and when it wrapped round the cart . . .

No anger in her voice. ‘It is running out on people’s trust.’

‘We came and we tried . . .’

The sadness in her voice. ‘It’s leaving them worse than before you came.’

‘We may not make it out. We have shit to go through. We have a Kaibil battalion tracking us, round us. It’s not just catching a bloody number 9 bus. “Let me know, please, when it’s Trafalgar bloody Square.” It is a poor chance. The other way round is you and me, all of us, dragged through Santa Cruz del Quiché and Nebaj and Playa Grande, it’s sadism time, slow death time. It’s you and me, all of us, begging to be killed, pleading. We go out, and we leave something, we leave
hope
. We leave the memory. In the villages they can hold the memory. Dead, we are forgotten.’