Cody's Army (2 page)

He moved out, traveling low and fast, bee-lining across the clearing, then along the wall of the mission, advancing on the
two sentries from their blind side.

Cody had been at this sort of thing for a long time, utilizing infiltration and combat skills taught him courtesy of Uncle
Sam’s Marine Corps and honed to a razor’s edge during three tours of combat duty with the Special Forces in Vietnam. There
he had commanded a covert “hit-and-git” hard strike force intended to neutralize important enemy targets, both military and
civilian, and, more than a few times, behind enemy lines, pulling off success after success when there had seemed no chance
for success, and usually with no mention made in official files.

During that time he had begun working with the CIA, and after the U.S. pullout he continued, even after his official military
discharge, handling difficult jobs for the Company that took him from Ireland to Iran, from Libya to El Salvador.

He drew the missions that were considered impossible, or maybe just too damn dirty, except for someone with his skills and
track record; dangerous, lonely work, but the only kind Cody could imagine for himself.

He came up on the two sentries.

They were not aware of his presence and wouldn’t be until the killing began.

He had slung his rifle by its strap across his right shoulder so it could be swung around instantly if necessary, but at this
point it was essential to keep the hit quiet.

Within moments all hell would break loose, but he had to get inside first and he had to free up these vehicles for Lopez and
his men.

He unsheathed his combat knife with his right fist and snaked his left arm around the throat of the closest sentry.

The young soldier’s cigarette dropped from his lips as he was yanked backward off his feet by the soundless, nearly invisible
apparition that buried the knife to the hilt from behind just below the sentry’s rib cage.

Cody’s left hand clamped over his victim’s face to silence the death gasp. He withdrew the blade from the body, stepping clear
from it as it sagged, turning his attention to the second soldier, whose eyes had widened into white orbs of terror at the
sight of his comrade’s collapsing to the ground, the apparition coming at him next.

This sentry started to track his AK-47 around into firing position, started to open his mouth to yell a warning to those inside
the walls.

Cody executed a martial-arts snap kick that ripped the rifle from the sentry’s grip and, before the man could step back or
react in any way, he moved in with a smooth continuation of the kick and slashed backhand up and outward with the knife’s
heavy blade—slicing open the guard’s throat from ear to ear. He swung away from the spurting geysers of the severed jugulars.

The sentry became a dancing dead man, toppling backward against the nearest Jeep, then flopping forward flat onto his face,
where he did not move, his dead hands clasped around his throat in a vain attempt to stem the blood flooding from between
his fingers to twinkle blackly across the moonlit ground.

Silently.

Silent killing was another of Cody’s specialities.

He faded back against the deeper shadows at the base of the wall and paused just long enough to eyeball Lopez and the inky
figures of the four others, jogging toward the vehicles from several points along the tree line across the clearing.

He moved out before they reached him, sheathing the combat knife, swinging his M-16 back around into firing position. He light-footed
across the distance separating him from the archway set in the center of the south wall of the mission.

As he advanced, the scent grew stronger of someone boiling cabbage soup.

The day started early in Nicaragua, as in all of Central America, because of the heat, which was already oppressive.

He had been summoned from a secret base in Honduras, where he had been assigned to train some contra leaders in the more refined
techniques of “soft” penetration and “hard” hit. The mountain bandits sent to him for shaping up had been lousy students,
drunk most of the time and not particularly bright. So he had welcomed the hurry-up summons from Gorman’s station in San Jose
de Bocay.

Four American Roman Catholic nuns were being held prisoner, under “house arrest,” within the walls of this mission, where
they had been serving their church for the past eighteen months. The Sisters were being held here for interrogation by a unit
of the Sandinista army battalion and charged with engaging contras in this region, according to Gorman.

The Nicaraguan regime was understandably sensitive in its dealings with the Church, since eighty percent of the Nicaraguan
population was Roman Catholic. So this “preliminary questioning” was taking place here under extreme low profile over the
past two days. It was for the men on the scene to decide if there was anything to suspicions that the Sisters were aiding
and abetting the contras.

This situation had been brought to Gorman’s attention by Lopez, the CIA’s liaison with the regional contra network.

Gorman had reiterated the gravity of the situation to Cody as they had ridden in the van together to within hoofing distance
of the mission.

“The kicker is that the boss nun at that mission, a Sister Mary Francine, has been up to everything those Sandinistas think
she’s been up to. Managua made a massive fuck-up when they first took on the contras up here. They relocated nearly seventy-thousand
peasants to keep them from being, uh, ’co-opted by the counterrevolutionaries,’ is, I think, how they put it. They weren’t
too nice about it. A lot of the people who originally welcomed the new government lost their enthusiasm in a hurry when they
saw their homes and land burning and were forced to move at gunpoint, and that brought about exactly what the government was
afraid of. That mission has served as a contact point for all kinds of things the government isn’t too happy with, and if
they do get those nuns to talk—and they will if they decide there is something to what they’ve heard—well, then, the Company
can just kiss off two years of damn hard work.”

Snider, Gorman’s partner, had tacked on almost as an afterthought, “And of course we want to pull those nuns out of that situation
in any event.”

Cody reflected on that for a moment as he reached the archway to the mission. He froze with his back to the outside wall,
his finger circled around the M-16’s trigger. He watched Lopez and his contra team reach the vehicles.

He had been hustled into the country for a rendevous with the Company men, and Lopez and this crew, and had been brought here
directly. His superiors in Honduras had told him that they needed one of the Company’s specialists in this kind of thing and
the nearest specialist had been Cody.

There was no time whatsoever to spare.

This was day three coming up of the soldiers questioning these nuns; it would surely be the day they would decide whether
or not to leave the Sisters alone or take them to their headquarters for a more thorough “interrogation”—which would be the
last anyone ever heard of the nuns, period.

That was the way things happened in Nicaragua. Life was even cheaper than it had been before the revolution. Atrocity was
the order of the day for both sides. For their part, the contras were unable and unwilling to care for captured troops and
informers in their mobile hit-and-run campaigns against both the government and civilians sympathetic to the government. At
the same time, the high command in Managua had intensified its military sweeps through cities and countryside with brutal
repression backed up by the muscle of Soviet arms unloading almost daily at the port of Corinto. In a country the size of
Alabama, population: three million, it was brother against brother; a bloodbath threatening to spill over Nicaragua’s borders
and growing worse day by day.

And here I am, right squat in the middle of another dirty little war, thought Cody, and he wondered what the tightness in
his gut was trying to tell him. It could have been the people he had to work with or maybe he had just been around this track
one goddamn time too many.

He told himself this was no time for such thoughts.

He glanced over at Lopez and gave the contra a thumbs-up sign that Lopez did not acknowledge or return. Then, taking a deep
breath, Cody pushed himself away from the wall and went around and through the archway and into the mission courtyard, his
M-16 up in both fists, ready to deliver.

TWO

H
e could see why the military vehicles had been parked outside. It was more than just a show of force to impress and intimidate
the locals.

The tiny courtyard of the mission was simply too confined a space in which to park or maneuver vehicles with any effectiveness
in the event of an attack.

A long structure that Cody had been told was the nuns’ living quarters, which had been taken over by the seven remaining troopers
Lopez claimed were stationed here, was ahead and to his left, beside an area where a tethered donkey munched contentedly from
a hay-filled cart.

Next to a chicken coop, a man in fatigues stood in the gloom, over a field stove, his back to Cody, preparing the soup Cody
had smelled.

Directly ahead of Cody, next to the living quarters, was the chapel with the bell tower he had seen from outside the walls.

Next to a playground, where a children’s swing set and slide clustered in the silver moonlight, to Cody’s right as he came
through the front gateway, keeping to the deep shadows, stood the wooden structure that would be the classroom where the nuns
slept by night and were questioned by day, again according to Lopez’s information.

He double-timed along the inside of the wall toward the rear of the classroom building.

A single light shone from the living quarters across the compound.

There would be one, possibly two, men stationed to keep an eye on the nuns.

The other three would be over in the nuns’ living quarters; the noncoms and officer probably already stirring, beginning another
day.

Movement from the building over there caught his attention before Cody could reach the rear wall of the classroom structure,
to put the classroom building between himself and those living quarters.

He froze in a kneeling position at the base of the wall, M-16 swiveled in the direction of the front door of that building
across the courtyard.

The front door had opened and a government soldier emerged onto the porch. He did not look in Cody’s direction, and if he
had, probably would not have discerned the blackfaced penetration specialist poised there, ready to open fire if need be.

Cody held his fire.

The trooper stood on the front porch and urinated into the dirt, then yawned, stretched, farted, turned and disappeared back
into that building.

Another light went on over there.

A glance at the eastern sky showed the first pink traces of the coming dawn.

This mission courtyard would be humming with activity within a matter of minutes.

Cody cursed again the delays that had beset his small group on their way here. The rough country roads had tortured their
van as Lopez had steered at a crawl past the scorched hulks of trucks ambushed by contras. A pin had sheared in the clutch
linkage, which one of Lopez’s men had replaced with a nail. Cody would have much preferred to stage this rescue in the dead
of the night, when all but the sentries would be sound asleep and there would have been a good chance of making it inside,
silently taking out the sentries and making it out of there with the Sisters, without any of the officers or noncoms finding
out about it until morning. But the time element was something he had no control over.

He quit his position, hurrying to the back door of the classroom building. He paused with his back to the wall of the building
and reached down to try the door handle.

It turned under his careful twist.

He used the barrel of his M-16 to nudge the wooden panel open a couple of inches, enough for him to get something of a look
inside the one-room school building.

A kerosene lamp cast the room in a warm, golden glow.

He did not see the nuns, but he did see one soldier—no more than a kid, like most of those serving on both sides in this nation’s
civil strife—seated behind a desk at the front of the classroom, in front of a blackboard.

The soldier had tilted his chair back against the wall and had nodded off, his AK-47 straddled across his lap.

Cody figured it one of three ways.

Either the Sisters had taken advantage of their guard nodding off and had already taken flight. Or they passively remained
captive somewhere inside the room, out of Cody’s line of vision; this was possible, since there was much of the room he could
not see from behind the two-inch space he had prodded the door open. Or the nuns were here and staying put because of a second
sentry that Cody also could not see.

He stepped back so he was facing the door, gripped his shoulder-strapped M-16 with his right fist, and again unlimbered the
combat knife. He delivered one mighty kick that slammed the flimsy piece of wood off its hinges, awakening the kid behind
the desk long enough for him to push himself forward away from the wall, righting his chair, springing up like a jack-in-the-box,
starting to track his AK at the figure in the doorway.