The Fighting Man (1993) (29 page)

By the end of the day they looked down onto the town of Nebaj.

The government’s inspectors were in. They had taken the far end of the open-plan area of the office space, and they had required a wall safe to be cleared and then they had made it their own with a changed digit code on the lock. Three desks were available to them, and they worked there with their laptops and their calculators and the files they had demanded. They were at the desks within two hours of the Houston flight smacking the tarmac at La Aurora. They accepted nothing, made their own coffee, hiked down to the dining area for their own open sandwiches, had booked into a hotel on their way from the airport to the embassy. A woman led the inspectorate team in a navy two-piece that would have been smart if it hadn’t creased in the cramped airline seat, and there were two men who crawled to her. The work of the DEA, Guatemala City, was on hold. It was the way when government inspectors called in at a field station. They could be called forward at any time, Tom or the Intelligence Analyst or the Chemist or the Treasurer . . . Hell, and why not, Tom Schultz thought, because there was no way that a war against drugs importation into the United States great and beloved of America should take priority over the crime of lost paperclips. He’d slept well, and the bottle of Glenlivet malt was dead in the rubbish can of his room, and by sleeping well he had sidetracked the nightmare of a downed bird falling with fire. They were squashed into customs territory, pushed off their own ground. He shared a table with the Liaison major who smoked sweet tobacco in his briar.

He turned sheets of paper, a blur to him, because he thought of a man he had seen, a hundred feet below a banking Huey, a man crouched at a cart that carried a flame thrower . . . He picked at the scar.

‘You should leave it . . . Sorry, what the hell’s it to do with me?’

‘Not a lot.’

The major bored on. ‘Was that in the Gulf, Desert Storm, I heard you were there?’

‘Right.’

‘I heard you were downed . . .’

‘Right, too.’

‘Where was it?’

He pushed the paper away, wished the major would wrap. ‘Over a shit piece of sand.’

‘I’d have given an arm to be there. I was at Bragg right through it, hell of a disappointment. Behind our lines or their lines?’

‘Their lines.’

‘You must have been in some state, that hole in you . . . Christ, you feel bad when you miss something like that. Don’t suppose you could walk out. Rescued . . . ?’

‘Right again.’

‘That must be quite a thing. I mean, to be rescued from behind their lines. Special Forces, those guys are real heroes. Quite a thing to owe your life to a man, group of men. Get up each morning, crap and wash and dress, and know that some place there’s a guy who’s the reason you’re still with us. Do you get to see him?’

Flatly said, ‘No.’

‘But you write . . . ?’

‘No.’

‘Heh, if I owed my life to a man I reckon I’d want to know how he was going.’

Tom said quietly, ‘I don’t see him, I don’t write to him. I don’t like to
owe
any man anything. You don’t rate when you’re downed. It’s not exactly the accolade of success. It’s not just bad luck, you know, it’s because of a
mistake
. The mistake cost a life and a machine, and I don’t care to be reminded of it. So, I don’t go visiting and I don’t sit writing chat letters . . . Subject matter closed.’

Three meetings scratched.

‘What the fuck do the Brits think they’re playing with . . . ?’

Guatemala printouts called up from the computers.

‘Isn’t that place an island of stability . . . ?’

A gathering of an assistant under secretary and a grade 3 staffer with responsibility for Central America and two at grade 5 who specialized in the affairs of that country.

‘Imagine the chaos if that place went down . . .’

Coffee on the table, and the grade 3 staffer breaking rules and smoking, fourth cigarette, and the large map spread wide.

‘The British have no right to be interfering . . .’ the older grade 5 man said.

‘Intolerable, the end game could be a disaster for the region . . .’ the younger grade 5 woman said.

‘Playing the goddamn end of empire game again, like the tune’s stuck on the needle, like they’re still in goddamn vinyl . . .’ the grade 3 staffer said.

‘Let them know they’re off field. Don’t take crap from them. Who is this jerk? How does he get rubbed? Kick their asses in London . . .’ the Assistant Under Secretary said.

The signal was drafted.

When the dusk came, when the hammering rain shone against the light of the high perimeter lamps, the boy was moving closer to the sentry on his raised platform. The boy played with stones, piling them, moving on and finding more, making new piles. A tin roof over the platform gave some shelter to the sentry, but there were no sides.

The town of Nebaj was 6000 feet above sea level, and the figures would have meant nothing to the sentry who had not learned to read nor to write, but he understood the cold and the loneliness that was sentry duty on a platform above the perimeter wire round the Nebaj army camp. All of the duty of sentries had been told by their sergeant to be watchful. There had been a battle, he had heard, at Playa Grande, but that was two, three days’ walk away, or many hours in the bus. He could see only to the rim of the light thrown by the high lamps, and caught in the light, moving casually nearer to him, was the boy, and each time he stopped so the boy found his amusement with the stones, making the small piles. Beside the platform, which was sited to guard it, was a gate. The gate was higher than the razor fence, a wooden frame with barbed wire slung across it. The gate was an entry point to the back of the camp, set between the coils of the perimeter razor wire. The sentry stamped his feet, shivered. His boots bucked the plank platform and rocked his machine gun that rested on a bipod with a belt loaded and readied for use. The sentry heard the new sound, strange. It was beyond the rain wall and the darkness wall and the cloud wall into which he peered. The boy was calling to him, soft but excited. The boy was away from the stones that he had piled and was close to the front spindle legs on which the platform stood. Beyond the rain and the cloud and the darkness was the squealing sound, not that of a young pig but that of metal on metal. It was what the boy had seemed to pick from the ground in front of the platform. What the boy held up shone brightly. It seemed to the sentry to be a ring. He crouched on his platform. The boy was reaching up to him and offering him the ring. His arm was out. The sentry’s fingers touched the bone hand of the boy. There was the squealing sound of the wheels, brought by the wind. He looked up, sharp. He saw the shadow movement where the light and dark merged. And the hand had hold of his wrist and pitched him forward, off the platform. The sentry hit the ground and the blade of the knife flashed in his face.

They were in four groups.

Golf and Oscar and Roger and Delta, Jorge’s thin joke . . . Golf was the flame-thrower cart and the mortars. Oscar was the machine gun and the rockets for the main gate of the camp. Roger was for the police barracks in the town. Delta was for the plaza in front of the church and the market.

Gord led Golf. Harpo led Oscar. Zeppo led Roger. Jorge led Delta.

The scream of the cart’s wheels going over the cleared ground, Gord and the Fireman and the Academic dragging it. Belting forward in the stampede, and Gord saw the stone piles as he had wanted them. Groucho, with guerrillas and men from Playa Grande and Acul village, waved by Gord to the stones and setting the mortars. What he had told the Street Boy who was scum and a thief, and brilliant, was to line the stones as he played so that one line directed a flight path for the mortar bombs to the administrative block, and another to the biggest dormitory building of the camp. Charging on past Groucho and rushing the wired gate.

They were halfway across the flooded football pitch, the cart’s wheels gouging the track, and the Archaeologist panting behind with the wheelbarrow, and the mortars were in the air.

The first mortar explosion, short of the command building, was the signal. The machine-gun fire of Oscar group at the main gate . . . the muffled shooting of Roger group and Delta group away in the streets of Nebaj. Tracer in the air. He was in the shadow of the latrine building. It was as he had argued it through. It was the way he had told them that it would be.

He could hear the shouting over the explosions and the shooting. The officers trying to gain control in confusion. He waited and he watched. He was fifty yards from the command building and seventy yards from the near corner of the dormitory building where the officers, in cover, were rallying frightened men. He wrenched the lever. The jet flew. Compressed petrol and oil arching forward. Gord pressed the ignition trigger.

The fire swarmed forward.

The fire caught at men who had been eating or resting, men who had been dreaming or washing their kit, men who had been reading or preparing to walk out into the town on the evening after market. Gord saw the fire catch at men, hold them, and he heard the screams of men who had been caught and held by the oil in the fuel. Moving now . . .

Running with the cart for the protection of the wall where the garrison’s vehicles were parked. Stopping. Dragging forward the cart and squirting the black snake forward and then the fire leaping after it and finding the walls and windows and doors of the command building. He saw the silhouette of a man who tried to close steel shutters to a window and who was beaten back by the stream of flame. He hosed the command building . . . Running with the cart and throwing himself down in open ground and aiming the nozzle ahead and towards the low concrete structure without windows that would be the armoury. There was a gaggle of men, shouting in hysteria, at the door of the armoury, and one trying to insert the key into the padlock, and the race for them to open the door before the fire reached them. A lost race . . . Going with the cart, needing to hug shadows, searching for darkness. There was the shrill laughter of the Street Boy beside him. There was the whisper of the Academic’s prayer. There was the wheezed gasp of the Archaeologist’s oath.

Gord ran for a new firing position.

The two lorries were returning troops, on rotation, from Chajul to Nebaj.

Had it not been for the weather, for the state of the road, the lorries would have been back in the garrison camp four hours before. There had been earth slips, rock falls, there had been a forty-foot-high conifer tree down across the road. The lorries had been crossing the plaza when the first mortar shell had hit the camp.

The Priest saw it.

He was a man of middle years and long experience of the triangle. Apart from nineteen months in Italy, studying in Perugia, and seven months in the Belgian theological centre at Louvain, he had spent the last thirteen years of his life in Nebaj. He had come to Nebaj to assist a Spanish Jesuit, shot dead on his bicycle on the road outside the town that led to the waterfall. He had worked with a German priest, fled from death threats. He had been his bishop’s man in the town until the bishop had closed the parish, too dangerous for the church to work. He had given last rites to thirteen women shot by the army in front of the church steps. To those who worshipped in his church he was a man not known to permit fear. He had taken that evening a cooked meal from the nuns at the Sisters of Charity orphanage, and shared laughter with them, and later it had been his intention to go again to the garrison camp to continue his protest at the health of coffee
finca
workers, who, it was his belief, had been systematically poisoned by the insecticides sprayed from aircraft. He had a file in his lodgings behind the church of the death threats that he received, and he liked to show the file to foreign visitors, bishops from Europe and aid workers and television crews. The Priest came from one of the cobbled narrow streets near the plaza.

The gunfire whipped the plaza. Market night, and the trading done, and the money gathered, and the drink started. Men and women and children scattering in panic. The rabble army ducking and firing, weaving and firing. The soldiers in cover beside the high wheels of their lorries.

They ran for the church doors. They abandoned their stalls and their drink, they dropped their food. The marimba music died. The fear rush for the doors of the church.

Where the Priest watched from, the corner of the plaza, an officer crawled up the steps of the church and, arm raised to get better distance, threw two grenades through the open door.

He had seen it, the grenades rolled into the church door, and the soldiers had fled. They were cut off from the camp, they scattered into the town.

The sheet had been ripped and tied to a broomstick. The sheet waved through the window at the end of the command building.

Gord called Groucho to him. The men were to stop firing, they were to stay down and not to show themselves. ‘Tell them that we recognize the flag of surrender. Surrender is unconditional. They are to come out unarmed and with their hands up. They are to come to the football pitch and they are to sit down. They will not be harmed . . . Tell them that.’

It was a dribble at first, and then a spurt. A river of men walked through the rain towards the football pitch, and there were others who were helped and some who were carried.