First Citizen (26 page)

“What do you mean, ‘went up’?”

“It looked like a carpet of shaped charges. Or maybe a dozen or twenty grenades wired up under the decking. We saw a ball of fire rise around the plane.”

“And he couldn’t have flown off?” I pressed. “Maybe on the other side, where you wouldn’t have—”

“No sir,” the pilot and copilot said at once.

“We stayed until the fire burned out,” the pilot, a major named LaCroix, continued. “Took only about twenty seconds, sir. So I don’t think his tanks ruptured. When it cleared, I could see the outline of the Colonel’s ship sunk in among the tangle of support struts, on the derrick’s main deck.”

“Any signs of movement? Could they be …?”

“We really couldn’t see, General,” the copilot put in.

“Excuse me, sir,” LaCroix said, hesitating. “But what is this all about? I mean, why were we diverted to that drilling rig? What did you think we could accomplish?”

In any regular army, those questions would have been a breach of discipline, and LaCroix knew it. Volunteer units, however, have different standards. Because my soldiers were half-mercenary, I had to lead them with a combination of trust and discipline. If I were to give orders they didn’t understand or agree with, on the strength of my authority as their general and my experience as a soldier—and that last was admittedly pretty slender—then they might respond with either massive desertions or a mutiny. And in neither case would that congressional resolution with my name on it mean damn all. LaCroix deserved an answer.

“We had prisoners, taken in Progreso,” I said, “who indicated that an expedition had sailed a few hours earlier to capture the oil fields. I wanted Colonel Birdsong to check it out so that we could prepare a plan to stop them.”

“You’ll pardon me, sir,” LaCroix said after absorbing this, “but it looks as if you fell for a trap. Those prisoners must have been lying. The people on that rig were definitely settled in and they were a lot farther from Progreso, by sea, than a few hours.”

“You may be right. We’re lucky I didn’t split the force further. As it is, we’ve lost both the oil fields and my second in command.” LaCroix only nodded. I dismissed them both.

I was set up in the former
alcalde
’s office. He had a corner suite in the admin buildings that overlooked the main plaza and was air conditioned like a meat locker. The windows were sealed shut with neoprene strips and actually sweated on the outside.

The square below me was quiet. Two of our three-ton trucks were parked along the south side. We had set up a sandbagged nest for two machine guns on the northeast corner, with a field of fire that covered four of the five streets entering the area. An ancient Mercedes 190D, painted a depressing aqua color, paraded up and down as Merida’s only taxi. It was missing its back window.

The Communists would certainly try to come back from the bush. In an hour … a day … a week. We could only dig in so far and then we had to be ready to fight for the capital all over again, from the inside.

How much the local people—the European-descended growers, their modern Mayan and Olmec peons, the Chinese traders, the state oil men—how much these various groups had supported the new Communist regime, or merely tolerated it, I did not know. How tightly organized it was, what kind of party discipline it maintained, I did not know. What kind of cracks might exist among its various bureaus and cadres, and between it and the tribal chiefs and village elders in the area—cracks into which I could insert my weedy toes and begin prying the whole fabric apart. … Again I did not know.

The California 64th was a fighting unit. In the local people’s lives, we were still the
gringo
from the north, the “them.” We had only limited liaison with the village structure, just a few ears out along the main roads.

I called in my intelligence officer, Major Michael Alcott. He claimed to be a great-nephew at several removes from the American author Louisa May Alcott, and I had no reason to doubt it. He was a cheerful young man, with a plumpness that two months at Poway had not melted but only hardened.

“Yes, sir?” Alcott raised an eyebrow at me, which pulled the whole side of his face up in a smile. I wondered if he practiced that in front of a mirror.

“We need an approximation of the local situation. Not only where the insurgents are, but when they’ll move, who their friends are, what their resources are.”

“Already working on that now, General. They burned all their paper files and did a bulk erase on everything in their stationary cybers. Not unexpected. But what they forgot was, the BLX switches in the phone system keep internal billing records. We’ve got every call they made, who to and how long, for the past two months. We’re dumping it all through a pattern-sampler program now. By this evening, we should know who the friends are. That will begin to give you an idea of where the enemy has gone and what they have to work with.”

“Excellent, Major. What have you got in the field?”

“I’ve sent our best Spanish speakers out with good-will baskets. Hand tools, mostly, a few biolumes, how-to books, some familiar foods, and a few pickled delicacies for the village elders. Peace Corps stuff that’s all appropriate to a rural setting with rudimentary power and data resources. Nothing political or cross cultural.”

“What’s their mission? Diplomatic?”

“Mostly. Show the local authority structure that we’ll support them. That they can work with us. It’s the standard beads-and-blanket number Columbus used.”

“But no fast results.”

“Afraid not, sir. If you want a semi-permanent base here, the relationships will take time. Villagers’ time. It would be different if we were just passing through.”

“Of course.” I kept him standing for a minute more. And after a pause: “Tell me, Major. What are your contacts like in the southwest, down near Campeche?”

Alcott’s brows came together. “There’s no G.V. unit assigned down there yet. Not that we’ve heard. Technically, you have a temporary charter that carries all the way to the Rio Candelaria.”

“I know that. But what about an American Express office or a bank branch? And is anybody, um, ‘passing through’?”

“I’ll get you a name, sir. But it might help if I knew why.”

“Somebody’s pulling some cute tricks with the eastern oil fields—”

“I heard about Colonel Birdsong, sir. Very sad.”

“Yes, well, I want confirmation. This end was clearly a setup, some kind of false trail. My guess is that anyone who knows anything hard is going to be in the south.”

“Excuse me, sir, but what does ‘confirmation’ mean? Do you want the bodies back?”

“I want to know what happened, why, and who did it. You get me those answers and we’ll know more about what kind of war we’re fighting. And yes, I want the bodies back.”

“I’ll get right on it, sir.”

Alcott left and, within three hours, had a contact name and probable location: Tom Pollock, a major, heading up an intelligence battalion that had splintered off the 29th New York Volunteers, the Irish Rogues, working out of the State of Tabasco. Pollock was now based somewhere along the coast between Champoton and Campeche.

Pollock? Well, well … Probably just coincidence.

In a few days, when the situation seemed to be running itself, I mounted a small expedition to go find this Mr. Pollock. We had two Stompers loaded with assault troops as an escort, while Alcott and I rode in a command gunship. We flew south from Campeche, moving in interlocking squares that quartered the forest, searching for some kind of settlement or camp. It took us two days to cover the thirty miles between the two cities this way. At the end of that time, far in the south, we caught a flash of light, a reflection off metal, deep among the trees. There was barely room to set the planes down.

“Guns ready but safeties on,” I gave the order. “These are friends.”

We walked forward through the undergrowth, coming to a circle of barracks tents. A circle, not a double line or square, which was the military way we’d learned to pitch tents. It looked more like a native camp than a soldier’s bivouac. No one in sight. No guards. No cooks or orderlies. I was about to suggest we’d found an abandoned site, except Alcott was on one knee by a trash heap. He had his nose into a green-foil ration pack.

“Hard to say, with the preservatives,” he said, “but I’d guess this was just opened. An hour—maybe two—old. They were still here this morning.”

“Any idea who ‘they’ are?” I asked. “Is all this stuff American? Or do we see any—”

“Nothing Russian.” Alcott’s eyes were moving, always moving. “No baskets or blankets that look like the locals … Hello? What’s this?”

He stood up and went to the corner ribbing on one of the tents. Tied there was something furry and black like a big, short caterpillar or some kind of uncamouflaged jungle animal. A panther’s black fur? He touched it, smoothed it, blew on the hair to test its depth and texture.

“It’s a scalp.”

Alcott was fascinated: He did not draw back his hand. One of the men turned away, making gurgling sounds. I could feel my jaw tighten of its own accord.

“General?” It was the trooper who had been sick. We turned and found two dozen men standing beyond him, in the gap between two of the tents. They wore green fatigues, jungle boots, belts with pouches and knives. They looked like American soldiers, except for a week’s beard growth. And there was something else, in the look of their eyes. A look that mixed deep fear and—and sexual excitement.

“Who are you?” That came from one slightly apart, a pace in front of the others. Their leader. His blouse had no insignia. He was tall, with curly brown hair and gleaming hazel eyes, but they had the same hooded look as his men’s. That broad forehead, wide mouth—the family resemblance was ringing alarm bells inside my head. This could only be a brother of Gordon Pollock.

“We are the California Sixty-fourth Air Cavalry,” I answered. “I’m Corbin, commanding.” That seemed to relax them—by about two percent.

“The Irish Rogues, New York. Major Pollock of the intelligence unit,” the leader said. “What can we do for you boys?” He tried to make it sound both hearty and casual, but his mouth worked as if he was gagging on a fine hair.

“We need some information, Major, if you can give it.”

He nodded. And his men began to spread out around the camp. However, they kept themselves between my men and the tents, effectively encircling us.

“I need to know,” I went on, “what kind of activity you’ve got in the eastern end of the Bay of Campeche, in the oil fields. We’re new in our sector and getting conflicting reports of infiltration.”

“You could find that out in Campeche town, better than here. Pemex stages its operations from there, you know.”

“We don’t necessarily trust the Pemex organization, do we?”

“Oh, we trust them,” he was nodding, slowly and judiciously. Then fast and eager. “On the oil business, we trust them completely. Don’t we, Lieutenant?” He turned to one of his men on the fringes, who was barely paying attention to our exchange.

“Sure, sir,” he drawled. Flash of teeth. “Trust ’em with our peckers. For sure.”

“See?” Pollock said. “You go to Pemex. They’ll tell you all about the rigs.”

When we landed, the wind had been from the west. I remembered that because we’d had to swing the Stompers into it for the landing. Then, while this strange verbal ballet was going on, the breeze had stopped. Now it picked up from the east, the direction Pollock and company had come from.

“Gah!” Alcott, beside me, suddenly choked. “What’s that smell?”

It was sweeter than jungle rot, deeper than the dark earth. Every human nose can identify it, instinctively. This was the stench of a battlefield at every stage of its lingering life, from the first moment of quiet after the firing stops, to the long weeks of silence after the flies, the crows, and the buzzards have done their work. It was the ancient stench of the slaughterhouse, with old blood worked deep into the grout between the tiles and rotten there. Pollock’s men froze at Alcott’s exclamation.

My men sniffed and then they froze, too. But their rifle barrels came up by millimeters, and I could hear the safeties go off, like crickets all over the camp.

“The smell?” Pollock asked, as if he had just noticed. “Oh, that! We were just down in the ravine. Butchering a cow. Messy business. But we like to live off the land. Real soldiering. Have to eat, you know.”

I looked down at the empty ration pack near his boot. The rifle barrels came a tad higher.

“That’s no fresh kill, Major,” Alcott said.

“Well, we’ve had to kill two—no, three—cows since we came here. Been here a while.”

Half of me wanted to take Pollock and his men at their word, smile and wave, and fly out of there. The other half wanted to know what the hell was going on. That half won.

“Let’s take a look in your ravine, Mr. Pollock.”

“You really don’t have any authority here, General.”

“Oh, but I do. All the way to the Candelaria River … Let’s go.”

I didn’t have to tell my troops to follow. Instead, I had to signal three of them to stay behind and guard the camp. However, all of Pollock’s men hung back.

The ground underfoot to the east was soft and the slope was gentle. The trees seemed to grow taller to compensate for the falling off of the land. The trunks became more widely spaced, the foliage higher and thinner. From the air we had noticed none of this. The ravine opened up like a great, columned hall. The misty light under the trees brightened. The smell got stronger.

We had passed the first tree that was not a tree before I recognized it for what it was. A smooth pole had been raised in the dirt. Hanging at about eye level was a dead leaf, or it was a piece of dried leather, or it was a mummified human foot. I looked up.

The top of the pole went straight up through the corpse’s withered buttocks; its sharpened point emerged from the ribcage. The limbs hung slack and smooth from this center. The skull tipped far back; the neck’s cords and vertebrae were so rotted that the head was about to drop like a ripe fruit.

In one breath, the ravine came into focus for me: ten, twenty, fifty more of these horrible trees leapt out among the natural foliage. The early dead were on this side. Across the way, the bodies became fresher and the smell even stronger.