Cody's Army (4 page)

A sluggish morning mist hugged the surrounding mountains except for the mile-high volcano, San Cristobal, which puffed a white
semaphore into the hot, white sky in the distance.

Gorman and Snider had been sitting on the front bumper of the van, watching the spot where Cody emerged at the front of the
column, the contras trudging along behind him.

A circle of smoked cigarette butts around the front of the van told Cody that the Company men had not had an easy wait.

They stood as he and the contras approached them.

Gorman was a broad-shouldered, mean-faced guy.

Snider was as average as they come in appearance, and seemed extremely nervous.

Gorman eyed Cody across a distance of some twenty feet.

Cody had halted at that spot as the contras continued their approach to the van.

Gorman studied Cody just standing there, not advancing with the others.

“I, uh, guess I owe you an explanation, John,” was all the bastard said.

“1 guess you do.”

Cody let nothing show in his expression or voice.

“It, uh, had to be this way, John.”

“Did it? Tell me about it.”

“Aw, hell, Cody, I didn’t give the goddamn order, y’know. I
follow
orders. You know how hard it is, getting our people funded down here. I, uh, guess it was figured that a few martyrs were
needed. It will look like the Sandinistas did that back there. You and Lopez’s boys got there to take them out, but too late.”

Cody nodded.

“Too late,” he echoed, a low, dangerous growl, and this time some of what he had been carrying inside since the mission must
have come to the surface because Gorman got a worried look on his face and stepped back.

“Anti-Nicaraguan sentiments will be fanned to a blind hatred,” Gorman went on. “That’s what we need, if we want to serve America’s
interests. Getting money out of a tight-assed Congress will be a cinch now.”

“And that’s why those four women lost their lives?” Cody asked. “I just want to be sure, Jack. We murdered those women because
it was our
job?”

He could not help the rising inflection on that last word.

Gorman heard it too. So did Snider, behind and to Gorman’s left. And so did the contras, who started to turn toward the confrontation
with mild amusement.

Gorman tried to chuckle, but it came out a sour, grating sneer.

“Hey, Cody, I thought they were sending me a pro. You’re not one of these dopes who still believes in right and wrong, are
you?”

“I guess I am,” Cody replied in a bare whisper.

He pulled up the M-16 he had been holding and opened fire.

THREE

F
ourteen Months Later…

He could tell instinctively that the first three human beings he had seen in more than a month meant trouble.

He had been about to set out to check his traps after breakfast, after his first drink of the day. The whiskey had felt as
good as ever burning his throat to release that first glow of warmth in his gut that meant the day was really beginning.

Cody had almost come to enjoy the short stretch of time during the preparation and eating of his breakfast, before that first
drink.

The scent of the pines and the crisp bite of the Canadian mountain air packed an almost painful nip that was strong enough
to wake a man with a clear head no matter how much he’d put away the night before. Morning was a time when the world was nothing
but Cody in his cabin on top of his mountain, alone up there in a clean world that had barely changed since Time began.

Times like those, he felt almost glad to be alive.

Then, if he had not awakened with them, the images would surface from the subconscious to torture him, and there he would
be once again, standing outside that country mission near San Jose de Bocay, staring down at what remained of four women of
the cloth; staring down at their pulverized corpses twisted in palpitating attitudes of death, what was left of their faces
registering expressions that cried pain and surprise, and the glazed eyes of the corpse that was a Sister named Mary Francine.

That’s when Cody always reached for the bottle and began the drinking that would last all day and into the night until loss
of consciousness granted refuge from grief and pain.

He was pulling down and checking the heavy duty Weatherby Mark V bolt-action .460 Magnum hunting rifle from its rack above
the fireplace. He always toted the big Weatherby and an Army issue Colt .45 automatic holstered at his right hip. A wide-blade,
double-edged hunting knife was sheathed at his left hip.

Old habits die hard.

He had started out of the cabin, when the buzzer sounding stridently across the room stopped him in his tracks. He wheeled
around and crossed to the electronic control panel, where he flicked off the alarm warning mechanism and activated the three
closed-circuit television screens located there.

The twelve-inch screens winked and shimmered to life, the center one picking up a late model station wagon as it bounced along
the narrow, rutted, steep incline through the rugged pine forest that was Cody’s 100-acre corner of the world.

That placed them one half-mile southwest of the cabin, no more than two or three minutes away.

He flicked off the system, exiting the cabin at a run toward the high ground thirty yards from the structure’s back door.

A few months from now, later in the year, he would have expected them. Hunters had ventured up the road as far as his cabin
on several occasions during the preceding hunting season, despite the posted No Hunting and No Trespassing signs.

He paused well into the dense, towering tree trunks.

On those previous occasions, he had pulled back to this spot to watch and wait, and those hunters had realized the road dead-ended
on private property and had steered their vehicles around and retraced their route away from his cabin site.

These weren’t hunters, he knew. The time of year, and a quiver of foreboding that reached down inside him and squeezed, told
him so.

He remained standing, his back to the direction of the cabin, pressed against the trunk of a pine that had to be eighteen
inches in diameter. He held the Weatherby perpendicular to his body and twisted around the trunk just far enough to peer down
into the clearing around his cabin.

The sigh of a cool breeze through the towering pines, and the earthy tang of nature enveloped him and he allowed himself to
become one with the living, breathing wilderness around him.

He was at home here.

He knew those in the vehicle would not be, and that was his one advantage. They would be pros, he was somehow certain, as
skilled in the art of tracking and killing as he was.

The station wagon halted. He heard the driver kill the engine.

A brief pause, then three men debarked to stand near each other but not clustered, two of them toting hunting rifles.

Cody recognized the one in the middle. The one without the rifle; the agent in charge. The one who lifted his hands to his
mouth to magnify his voice and shouted.

“Cody!”

Cody did not move, maintaining his position, his rising combat senses probing the thickly wooded wilderness around him in
all directions for any sign of danger, but the only other presence he could detect was the trio down there by the cabin.

Yeah, he recognized their leader all right. He’d known Lund all the way back to Nam, and had been on friendly terms with Pete
right up until Cody’s abrupt leave from government service.

The last time he had seen Pete, Lund had headed the CIA’s assassination unit.

Cody rapidly considered his options. He had hoped they never would find him but had somehow always known they would if they
really wanted to. A man cannot hide from the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America any more than he
can hide from his own past.

He had taken every conceivable step to conceal his ownership of this land, and since leaving the Company under the cloud of
what had happened in Nicaragua, he had not left his property line since arriving here except for a monthly sixty-mile round-trip
down to the crossroads country store at the base of the mountain, the nearest outpost of civilization.

He had remembered, from his long-ago days at Princeton, Plato’s dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Well,
he’d given himself a life with nothing to do but survive up here mountain-man style the year around, alone with the wilderness
and his past, with nothing more than the solitude and time to examine the life he’d led, but he could find no good in his
life that could ever balance the scales for what he had been a part of on that last mission into Nicaragua; the atrocity that
drove him to this Canadian mountaintop.

Technically, of course, the massacre of those nuns had not been his fault, but such knowledge did little to erase the stark
mental images of the bloodied, fresh corpses of Sister Mary Francine and the other three women at that little country mission.

He had spent his time up here prowling this no-man’s land, hunting, trapping, trying to somehow make sense of the ungraspable;
of what was done and lost forever. He spent his nights hitting the bottle too damn hard but he had never let self-pity or
guilt dull responses and reflexes and a soldier’s sixth sense earned in the hellgrounds of the world prior to his “retirement.”

Lund stopped calling out his name from the clearing by the cabin, he and the two men with him standing in their loose cluster
down there, gazing off in various directions toward the walls of pine that lined the ridges around the cabin.

Cody noted that the two guys with Lund had their rifles aimed at the ground, not in firing position.

He made his decision.

A hawk chose that moment to soar into the clearing, riding the air currents high beneath the cobalt-blue sky.

Cody left his concealment, not with any sudden rushing movement, but, rather, assuming an easy gait as he purposefully made
himself visible to the others, as if he were coming upon the cabin, returning with no prior realization that Lund and his
two pals were down there.

He had to keep himself visible several moments longer than he intended because Pete had his eyes skyward, watching the hawk.

Then one of the other men spotted him, shouting something that swung around the attention of Lund and the other man, and they
all saw him then, which is what he had waited for.

He whirled, lunging back into the shadowy interior of the half-lit world at the base of the pines that made the mountains
a carpet of crisp green.

Lund shouted something at him from below back there but he could not discern the words.

He heard nothing but his own footfalls along the rocky trail that had been here when he bought this property. He did throw
one look over his shoulder to make sure Lund and the others were after him.

They were, the Company men hoofing up the incline in hot pursuit.

He poured on the steam, his legs pumping, following the trail for several yards to where it dipped beneath the lip of a wrinkle
in the terrain, losing him from the line of vision of the men dashing after him.

They had not opened fire on him, and that decided him on what to do next.

He jogged a dozen more long paces, then darted to his left, positioning himself behind another tree trunk amid a thick growth
of conifers that would effectively block him from sight of the men giving chase; the reason he had chosen this exact spot
fourteen months ago when he had gone about securing his hideaway.

His erstwhile employers were the least of his worries, he had known all along. A man made enemies working for the Company
and the many Cody had made would hardly be expected to give up the chase to even up old scores just because he had declared
himself out of the game.

So far, no one from his past had managed to track him down.

Until now.

They came over the ridge at the dead-heat gallop, Lund in the middle, the rifle toters evenly spaced from each other, not
bunched together.

Lund topped the lip of the ridge and Cody saw he toted a snub-nosed .38 revolver, as the three charged along the trail coming
past where Cody knelt in the milliseconds it took before the three Company men had time to pull up with the realization that
they had lost sight of him.

The first man trotted by his place of concealment, the one in the lead, starting to slow when he realized Cody was not up
ahead on the trail as they must have expected him to be.

Lund and the third man slowed their pace.

Cody waited until Lund was where he wanted him, then he leaned forward to a taut length of clear rope and he severed that
rope with one swift cut, causing the trap to be sprung.

The loop of the nearly invisible line snapped around Lund’s ankles while the tree limb it was attached to sprung up, released
by the line severed by Cody, the loop tightening into a knot around Lund’s ankles and whisking him upward, head-over-heels
upside down, the .38 flipping from his fingers.