James Patterson (15 page)
Authors: Season of the Machete
The driver of the red bus, forty-nine-year-old Franklin James, was feeling sweaty and itchy and most of all malcontent, this particularly sweaty afternoon. As the antique double-decker bumped along, he could feel the whole Goat Highway in the palm of his hand. In the shivering black knob of the stick shift.
Jus’ what is th’ problem now? James talked to himself. Tired of drivin’ dis funny-time bus. Earnin’ yo’ money too easy, hey, mon? What to break yo’ ass for it lak nigger? Admit it, mon, yo’ got it easy. Admit to yo’self, truth, Franklin….
Just to break the everyday monotony, though, the driver thought he would do something revolutionary today: go left instead of right at the vee in the road about a quarter of a mile ahead. He would take the scenic route instead of the Goat Highway this day. Through the old sugar-cane fields.
Franklin James looked in his rearview mirror and saw straw beach hats and lobster red faces. A pretty blond bitch in a halter top was playing with her tittie straps. There were a few empty seats for a change, too.
At the vee in the road, the bus driver took a left instead of the usual Goat Highway route. As he made the wrong turn, the red-faced manager of Elizabeth’s Fancy jumped up in the third seat of the bus.
“This is the wrong road, you idiot bastard. Back it up, boy. Get on the Goat road.”
Which Franklin James did with a subservient smile and not a word of protest. Admit it, mon, yo’ got it easy.
Most of Dred’s men were lying on their stomachs back twenty to forty yards from the dirt road. A few bare-chested boys had shimmied up into coconut trees.
Colonel Dred was paying no attention. Instead the twenty-seven-year-old man watched the burly African and the Cuban.
A man smoking a cigarette and wearing a striped woolen hat shouted to Dred from out of a tree. “Dey comin’ ‘round in ‘bout annudder minute.” The soldier slipped his cigarette butt down out of the tree.
Monkey Dred turned and gave a hand gesture to the rest of his guerrillas. The sound of rifles clicked off echoes on both sides of the Goat Highway.
Then Dred put the sleek M-16 to his own cheek. He sighted it very carefully.
Squeezed.
Squeezed.
The whole top half of the Cuban’s head splattered. Blood splashed onto tall stalks of grass as far as thirty feet away. Kingfish Toone was thrown forward with his huge black arms stretched out wide, a big dark hole in the back of his khaki shirt.
“Bad kind a niggers,” Monkey Dred shouted to the soldier in the tree. “Drivin’ Cadillac. Warin’ perfuume, yo’ know.”
Besides, the executions had been well paid for by Damian Rose. They’d earned Dred two more precious machine guns.
Speckles of red splashed through a latticework of jungle green. Then Colonel Dred could see the upper deck of the bus again. Sun rays ricocheted off the scaling red roof. Some banana wrens passed by. Every window in the old bus was flung open wide. Americans, Germans, English, and South Americans looked out on handsome mahogany trees, blooming wild lilies, parakeets.
Jungle, mahn, jungle.
“Ay pretty!” Dred shouted to the treetop birds. Jacamars. Parrots. His adrenaline was flowing like the teeming streets of Trenchtown. The juices made him feel like a Rastafarian superman.
Jah.
A walking, fast-talking contradiction.
The teetering double-decker bus had turned down a narrow straightaway less than a hundred yards away. It was coming straight at them, down a tunnel of coconut and fir trees.
Dred’s men began to talk to one another. Enthusiastic shouts. Hypertense babble.
The red bus was fuzzy and just a little unreal through shimmering waves of heat. High blond weeds fanned away from it like flying hair. Palms and ferns loudly scraped the roof and windows.
Dred was staring so hard, anticipating so very much, that the bus seemed to stop moving. To freeze on the straightaway.
“Ro-bert,” he screamed. “Ro-bert!”
A tiny rifleman with sick yellow eyes and a yellow Che beret came running up beside him. The man’s big M-16 rifle made him seem like a child.
“Stay by me, Robert. Now watch closely. I want you to shoot it.”
As if the red bus were a charging elephant.
Up ahead, Franklin James watched a young woman and boy step into the Goat Highway. Barefoot, dressed in sun-bleached rags, they stood in the middle of the road, both of them waving excitedly at the bus.
James cursed to himself, but he touched his foot to the brakes. He shifted gears and, before the bus stopped fully, had the folding doors crashing open. “Hey, what is it, woman?” the fat black man shouted angrily.
“Yo’ can take us to main road?” the woman screamed through the open bus door. “Bway is bahd sick, mon.”
The bus driver’s face took on a pained look.’ ‘Oh, lay-dy! I can’t ride no-body not fram dat plantation, yo’ know.”
“My bway is sick!” the black woman screamed.
Suddenly a rifle shot crashed through the top right corner of the bus windshield. The entire half of the windshield fell back inside the bus.
Franklin James put his foot to the ground, and the Grasshopper bucked and jumped forward.
The hollow popping sound of M-16 rifles erupted everywhere.
Not thirty yards away from Dred’s men, the tall, gawky bus seemed to strike a giant pothole. The bus slid quietly to the center of the road. It seemed to ride on its right tires for a while. Then it swerved sharply to the left.
Franklin James was already dead, bumping back and forth over the steering wheel. People inside the bus were falling out of their seats.
Like an enormous lawn mower, the double-decker ran over five- and six-foot-high ferns, thick brush, small trees. It hit a huge royal palm straight on, and the palm tree tore back through the engine and cab. The tree trunk continued five feet down the aisle, crushing people in the front seats, and then the Grasshopper finally came to a stop.
Gaping holes began to mottle the side of the bus that faced into the firing squad.
On the second level of the bus, the Tanner security guards answered the rifle fire with a few pistol shots. When the guards were lucky they managed to hit somewhere in the trees, where Dred’s men I were systematically destroying the bus. Shooting it to bits.
The heads of dead passengers sat still in several of the open windows. The broken engine had begun to spew thick black smoke. A few of the bus passengers climbed out far-side windows, tried to run, and were shot down. A small blond boy in red shorts lay dead in the grass to one side of the bus. An older man lay beside a big, black front tire. A twelve-year-old girl ran like the horses on her father’s farm—a beautiful little girl from Surrey, England—and she was a survivor.
For ten minutes there were shouts and stomach-freezing screams from the forty-odd people trapped in the bus. Then there was no sound except for the lazy popping of M-16 rifles.
Colonel Dred and his marksman, Robert, walked to the bus in smoky, devastating silence. As they got up close, parrots and jacamars began to scream in the trees again. The tiny marksman took out a dull black Liberator pistol.
The two disappeared into the bus, and more gunshots were fired. A man screamed inside the bus. Another muffled gunshot sounded inside.
When they came out again, Dred waved to the four boys standing up on the Goat Highway. Each of the four had a long, scary fright wig. Each held a shiny field machete with a red neckerchief tied around the hilt.
At the same time, the other rebel soldiers were getting up out of the brush; dropping down from the trees. The guerrillas began to light up ganja sticks, regular cigarettes, cheap cigars. Only a few of them came forward to examine the bus.
It was Dred himself who saw the beige-and-green shadow moving through the thick backwoods behind the red bus. He recognized the face of Damian Rose, a pink smudge among the trees and bright green bushes: A shiny white smile.
“Aaagghh, Rose. Jeezus, mahn!” The young guerrilla screamed as he realized what was going to happen. He tried to turn away.
The first rifle shot pierced the back of his head; it came out where the black man’s nose and mouth had been. The wound was very hot, and for a split second Dred’s eyes and nose seemed to be on fire. The ground rushed up at his face, and then it all disappeared on him.
He was falling down a pitch-black hole that echoed his screams—
R …o …s …e …
By 6:00
P.M
. that night, the president of the United States knew about it.
Five members of the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism—the chief of staff, the assistant to the president for national security affairs; the press secretary for the president; the secretary of defense; and the director of the CIA—sat with him in the Oval Office of the White House.
The director of the CIA briefed the chief executive on selected facts about Lathrop Wells, Nevada; the Forlenzas; Isadore Goldman; Damian and Carrie Rose; San Dominica. His primary recommendation at the moment was that the contract operators Damian and Carrie Rose be eliminated immediately. Searched out and destroyed.
“You’re shitting me,” the president of the United States said after he’d heard the entire story. He looked around his Oval Office. At the chief of staff. At his press secretary. At his assistant for national security. “Somebody tell me this man is shitting me. That’s an order.”
From 6:30 in the evening on, the world’s TV and radio stations interrupted their regular programming to announce that the leftist San Dominican rebel, Colonel Dassie Dred, had been killed during an attack on a tourist bus some twenty-five miles east of the capital city of Coastown.
At 8:00
P.M
. Carrie arrived in Washington, D.C.
Now the tricky stuff began.
The Perfect Escape
May 8, 1979, Tuesday
Bay of Pigs II
Damian and I had violent arguments about the Escape. My point of view: get out of the Caribbean immediately. Damian’s: finish the operation as it should be finished. Take care of Campbell and Harold Hill right. Stop them from coming after us…. That was how Macdonald became important. Also how Damian got the idea for what happened in Washington.
The Rose Diary
May 8, 1979; Fairfax Station, Virginia
Tuesday Morning. The Eighth Day of the Season.
The morning after the massacre at Elizabeth’s Fancy, Mark Hill took a fast shower, combed his thick blond hair, then put on a freshly washed Washington Redskins sweatshirt and neat bell-bottom jeans.
The handsome teenager looked in the mirror over his bureau and gave himself an “okay” sign and a broad, comical wink.
Downstairs, he could hear his mother busily making breakfast. Fried-bacon smells were drifting upstairs. Bacon, and also fresh coffee, which Mark hated with a sincere passion.
The fourteen-year-old quickly brushed his teeth and used the family Water Pik. Then he took the front stairs in three broad jumps. He strode casually into the kitchen, unconsciously imitating a pro football quarterback named Bill Kilmer.
Bright sunshine streamed through the open back door and the saffron-curtained window over the sink. A man and a woman in white terrorist masks stood in front of the sink, on either side of his mother. Each of the two held a long-barreled black revolver.
“You just listen to what these people say.” Carole Hill spoke in a calm voice that made the boy wonder how his mother had gotten so brave so quickly.
Carrie Rose watched the boy through narrow eye slits in her mask. “That’s right, Mark. We’re not here to hurt either of you. Sit down there at the| table. Your mother will make you some breakfast.”
Never once taking his eyes off the intruders, the teenager slowly sat down.
Carole Hill walked over to her stove slowly and cautiously. Her hands trembled as she started to turn her bacon with a table fork. Little spits of grease flew up at her apron and face. “My husband will be home soon,” she said matter-of-factly. “He just—”
Carrie smiled under her mask.’ ‘Carole Ann, your husband isn’t even in the country right now. Relax. Cook us all a nice breakfast, okay? We’re going to be spending the day together, it looks like.”
The man with her, a New York gunman by the name of Kruger, sat down across from Mark at the breakfast table. “Pay it no mind,” the man said. “Doesn’t concern you, Mark.”
“How do you know my name?” was the boy’s first question.
“Oh, we’re friends of your father’s.” Carrie smiled.
One girl’s candid evaluation of the CIA’s Caribbean Account in 75…. Basic ineptitude down to a formal science. An inordinate paranoia about Fidel Castro, and/or Moscow. Paranoia about potential trouble in Puerto Rico. Paranoia over Cuban troops in Africa. A gross overestimation of Dassie Dred. A correct evaluation of Joseph Walthey as a potential strongman pig and ally…. Mostly bad information of all things. Bad Intelligence….
The Rose Diary
Coastown, San Dominica
That same morning in Coastown, forty-four-year-old Harold Hill yawned so that his jaw cracked.
He stretched his thin arms and made eating noises with his lips, teeth, sticky furred tongue. He took off his horn-rimmed glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.
Harold Hill then rearranged himself on a sighing wing chair inside the U.S. embassy.
He glanced through an army report on Peter Macdonald: “Peter Stillwell Macdonald. Born Grand Rapids, Michigan; 1950. Son of a U.S. Army colonel and a high school mathematics teacher. Youngest of six sons. U.S.M.A. 1969-71. Honorable Discharge. Above-average intelligence. Inferiority complex caused in part by older brothers’ successes…. Mixes well but prefers to stay alone…. No close friends…. Subject of homosexual probe (’73—all branches): negative…. Strong combat skills but ambivalent attitude about current war. A model top sergeant….”