The Fighting Man (1993) (54 page)

Heh, a Kalashnikov would make him the king amongst his friends . . .

They found the pilot at first light on the beach.

He had made a fire between rounded sea-washed stones. The best fish that he had taken in the night, on a hand line with feathers, was the barracuda. He had made the spit, himself, in the garage behind his home, and he turned the gutted fish slowly over the wood fire and the smoke. It was what he always did when he went for the night’s fishing, take the best and grill it for himself and eat it before going home with the rest of his catch. It was the best place to be, alone in the boat and out on the sea, away from the fantasy success of Havana, rubbish city.

He took the message.

The pilot was to report immediately to the base commander.

He finished turning the fish until the lifeless skin had peeled and fallen hissing into the fire. He ate the rich oiled meat of the fish until he was gorged. He threw what was left of the fish to the boldest gulls that had strutted close to him. He kicked out the fire. He checked the ropes that held the boat on the beach and then he went home and he gave his wife the fish that would be shared between his own household and his mother and her mother. His wife told him that she had heard that there was a shop in the old city, the rubbish city, that had soap. The pilot drove his wife to the shop and left her in the queue that had formed.

He reported to his base commander.

He was not asked, he was not permitted to evaluate the possibility of it, it was an order.

The day was tomorrow. The time was 0500 local. The co-ordinates of the location were 1509/9052.

It was found for him on the map, 1509/9052, at Canillá. It was not known what would be there . . . Landing lights? A grass strip? The military? How many to collect? There were no answers, the shrug of ignorance, but an order. The base commander was a Party member. The father of base commander had fought with the ‘old man’ in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and the uncle of the base commander had been with the ‘old man’ in the attack on the Moncada barracks at Santiago de Cuba. It would not have benefited the pilot to dispute a piss awful order. The pilot said that he would not require a navigator to fly with him, and that was his way of expressing an opinion on a piss awful order.

He went to the hangar.

She had not been repainted since he had brought her back. He walked in the darkened hangar around Echo Foxtrot. She was still black-coated and anonymous without markings. A beauty in her gaunt ugliness. He asked the supervisor of the maintenance technicians to work on the engines, and he asked for additional fuel tanks, and he told them at what time the work must be completed.

He went home again, to sleep. His wife was not yet back from the soap queue in the old rubbish city. The pilot would not tell her, when she returned, that he would be flying through the night into Guatemala.

He played good tennis. He came from the baseline to the net, and he could get back to take her lob when she retrieved his smash shot. He ran her ragged. When he played his best tennis, early in the morning after he had killed in the night, he had to scheme to permit her, at the end, to win.

The lieutenant, codename Benedicto, who had killed a young woman in the night with a pistol shot into the temple of her forehead, manufactured a twisted ankle as an excuse to lose. Only when he was losing, when the spark had gone from his game, did the crowd that had gathered start to disperse. Many had watched, but then there were many more back at the club than there had been the week before, back from Miami and Orlando, back from Houston, back from Los Angeles.

The fear of the rat mob swarming the streets of the capital city was buried, and he had played his part in the burying.

When she had taken the victory he walked to his fiancée and a warm smile played at his mouth, and he shook her hand in respect. It was what her father and mother liked to see as they took their breakfast against the plate window above the court. Only straggled ends now remained to be tied. The young woman had died because of what she had known and what she had seen and what she could have said. The lieutenant’s was a war without surviving witnesses. Before he showered he went inside to the breakfast room and he took a glass of orange juice with his fiancée’s parents, and he politely asked her father what was the price of beef up north in the burger trade.

Later, he would go back to the basement files of the G-2, Intelligence, and he would browse that he could better tie the ends.

They were supine. He thought none of them had slept well. He thought that in the quiet of the night they, each of them, would have lingered on the memory of Groucho, and Groucho’s killing. No food for them. Again, Gord took charge.

They started beside the river. Gord led and they followed. He took them a full hundred paces up the bank of the river and he made the cart go through the ground where there was still wet mud from the old rain. The cart left good tracks on either side of their boot marks.

He waded into the water. The height of the flow was above his ankles and below his knee and the water washed the axle of the cart. He waved the Street Boy to follow him and the wheelbarrow made a boat, easy to manoeuvre. They came in after him. They dared not question him. He could see it in their faces, Jorge disputing the need for the cart, Harpo challenging the need for the wheelbarrow with the compressed air cylinder and the fuel, Zeppo ridiculing the further need for the fire . . . and they dared not speak it. The cart was his. The cart was power.

He stood in the water and they splashed around him and the dog careered after a floating leaf.

‘I have to have the big effort. It is today, the next hour, that we either break free of them or we fail. I must have the big effort. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the patience, to explain everything that we will do . . . I have said that I will get you to a strip and if I have the big effort then I will achieve that . . . I have to hope that the plane will come to the strip,
hope
, but we will be there. If the plane comes then you will be going out. I don’t care if you never walk, run, another yard after today, but you will walk today and you will run today. I don’t care if you never lift anything again heavier than a beer glass, but you will lift weight today. I make a promise to you . . . If you don’t want to run and lift weight today then go to the bank and sit on it and wait for the Kaibiles to come. And I promise, within twelve hours of them coming and taking you, you will be screaming for the chance to walk, run, and lift weight. For one more day we have to lose them, if we don’t lose them . . .’

They depended on him. Gord was the straw they clutched at. They would follow him.

He dragged the cart wheels over the river stones and Zeppo helped him, and Harpo carried Gord’s machine gun and Zeppo’s machine gun, and Jorge directed the front of the buoyant wheelbarrow, and Alex carried Eff and Zed helped Vee. He took the cart down the river and they were straggled after him. Where they had gone up along the bank they now came down the river.

They were an hour in the river.

Gord called the rest halt.

They stood in the water and they gasped, and each of them had fallen, and each of them was grazed from the cold rock. Jorge was close to Alex. He said something to her, and there was a quiet smile on his face, and she laughed gently back at him. He could not hear what was said, what made her laugh. When had he last seen the quiet smile of Jorge? When had he ever heard the gentle laugh of Alex? They were the pretty young man and the pretty young woman. It was instant, the stab pain of jealousy . . . Alex had loved him and Alex had never laughed with him . . . It was a moment. He clawed the breath down into his lungs. The water was deeper. It was a place where a rib of stone ran into the flow of the river, cascading it. It was the stone that he wanted. All his strength to move the cart out of the river’s flow and to draw it up onto the rib of stone, and again Gord’s strength to help the Street Boy and Jorge lift the wheelbarrow onto the sliding surface of the stone. He told Alex, curtly, that first she must get the Indian onto the stone and then she must lift her dog onto the stone, the dog’s footclaws must not scrabble in the bank of mud at the side of the rib of stone. They were gathered precariously on the stone and he snapped the instructions at them.

He would lead, and now he would carry Eff. Where his feet went their feet should go, exactly where his foot went.

Alex should carry her dog. The footclaws of her dog were not to touch the ground.

Jorge and Zeppo and Harpo were to carry the cart, 370 pounds’ weight. The wheels of the cart were not to make tracks.

The Street Boy and Zed were to carry the wheelbarrow. Vee was to be at the back and what marks they left he should obliterate.

‘Questions . . . ?’

Jorge asked, unsure, ‘When will we know if we have lost them?’

Gord said, cruel, ‘When the plane has landed, when there is no ground fire, when there are no helicopters, when the plane has lifted out, that is when we will know we have lost them.’

He loosened the straps of his backpack, so that it was low down over his haunches. He should have changed the field dressing and the face of Eff was greying and the breathing slower, and the flies swarmed at the wound. He heaved him up so that his belly was laid across the top of the backpack and he hooked his arms under the shoulder and under the groin of the man. It was the man who had brought the attaché case with the photographs into the bar beside the sea loch. It was the man who had smashed him down. ‘What is the price of freedom? What is the cost of honour?’ Gord swayed. He took the first step forward. Onto a stone. He staggered. Onto thin moss. Onto hard ground. Gord rocked. Onto a fallen branch that would not break. They followed him . . . He saw the pain of their faces as they cursed the dead weight of the cart . . . Stone to moss to hard ground to branch to stone . . . He was looking back. Vee was squatted on the rib of stone, one good leg, fuck knew what gangrene dirt was settling in one bad leg, and was wiping the stone dry with a cloth, like he was an old woman cleaning a front step.

Going slow, and going forward, and turning again and looking past them and seeing Vee spread dead leaves over each foot place.

There was a helicopter above, quartering and searching, but not the hound that tracks a scent. The helicopter had no trail to follow.

It was all that Gord could offer.

‘I have lost them.’

Arturo said it into the face microphone.

Tom stared down into the tree canopy. Arturo had said it crisp. There were no excuses and no explanations. Tom raked the stretching tree canopy and saw nothing.

The distorted voice, ‘Wait out.’

The Kaibiles had found the place where the group had slept, and they had found the track of the cart that carried the flame thrower, and the other wheel and foot marks. The Kaibiles had followed the trail along the bank of the river to the place where they had gone down into the water, and there they had lost the group.

Below him, under the trees and in the scrub, invisible from the air, were three companies of the Kaibil battalion. Below him, unseen from the air, was the struggling and running group . . . He thought of them in the Country Attaché’s office. He wondered if they would have requested that another flier be brought in. He imagined them, the Intelligence Analyst and the Treasurer and the Chemist and the Liaison major from SouthCom, sitting with their coffees on the low easy chairs in the Country Attaché’s room. And spread on the low table in front of their knees would be budget assessments and satellite telephone call intercepts and radio transcripts, and the big maps that marked the landing strips on the
fincas
that were red-ringed and believed to be transshipment points . . . They were irrelevant to Tom Schultz. He turned the bird. He went back over ground they had already quartered. Only his Huey bird in the air. As if he had made it his territory. Better alone. If there had been other birds up then the search would have been diffused and that way there was the probability of confusion. He had drawn the squares on the map and he worked over each square . . . They meant not a shit to him, the Country Attaché and the Intelligence Analyst and the Treasurer and the Chemist and the Liaison major from SouthCom. He had tried to belong and he had failed . . .

The radio sparked in his ear.

‘So, you have lost them, Arturo, brilliant, incredible. All shit promises, all shit talk. You asked for control, you were given control, and you have let them slip . . . You are all shit, Arturo. Should I, again, change the command of the battalion, Arturo? I have to go to the Chief of Staff, do I tell him Arturo is shit, should I tell him I was wrong to back you? Should I . . . ?’

Beside him, Arturo snapped the switch, cut the transmission.

. . . He had failed. They were irrelevant to him because he did not care whether Mother America was awash in smack, coke, crack. He did not care to fight a losing war against the dealers and the pushers and the traffickers of heroin, marijuana, cocaine . . .

Soft in his ear, Arturo said, ‘Can you think like him? I cannot . . .’

He wanted only to hit the man. He hated the man. Each morning when he woke, faced another day, he thought of the man. The man dangled him. The man led him on a string. It was the same string that had fallen loose from the wrist of the body that he had seen. The man had the power over him, the man had saved him. He hated the man because the debt was unpaid, not even paid with a letter of gratitude.