The Viper Squad (12 page)

Both Tommy’s legs were broken, his right hip fractured and some ribs cracked. According to the doctors, he’d be on his back
two months minimum.

“And we don’t have no medical insurance that covers him now that his father took that non-union job on the building site,”
she went on. “If that driver had done the proper thing, his insurance company would take care of everything. I’m not asking
you to help out, Joe,” she added hurriedly. “You done enough for us already, and I heard you’re as broke as the rest of us
these days.”

“’Fraid so,” Joe said. “Tommy told me he recognized the truck and driver. Hit-and-run is a crime. What did the cops say? Tommy
said they had been to see him.”

“The officer came and wrote down what Tommy said. But the driver denied it.” The woman’s face clouded with shame. “The officer
tried to put it nice to me when he said poor Tommy’s word wouldn’t count in a court of law; that his evidence would be ruled…
not regular.”

Joe himself talked to the driver of the truck, a loud—mouth who ran metal bars from Youngstown down to Wheeling, West Virginia,
five times a week and who liked to highball along a two-lane highway between the plant and Route 11, scaring the shit out
of oncoming traffic. Joe spoke to him, and the guy didn’t even bother to deny it was he who’d hit Tommy. He told Joe to fuck
off, and stuck the banel of a Smith & Wesson .38 in Joe’s neck to make his message clear.

Joe let two days go by so he could simmer down and put in a little thought on how best to straighten out this cowboy. He sure
as hell didn’t want to go to the pen for eight years on a manslaughter rap.

The trucker shouldn’t be hard to locate. He had a big mouth and a CB radio in the cabin of his truck tractor. Joe parked his
Chevy on the shoulder of the two-lane highway between Route 11 and the plant a little after 10:15 in the morning. He knew
the voice on the truck’s CB long before he saw the blue-and-white rig. The driver’s handle was “Bullhead,” and he was talking
up a storm.

Next morning Joe borrowed a friend’s Ford Escort and fixed a pair of New York plates on it, a pair from a collection he had
taken from car wrecks on Route 80 in the bad old days when he had need of such things. He waited on the shoulder of the two-lane
road, listening on his CB and carefully watching the occasional trucks that roared by at more than 70 mph on this deserted
stretch. He heard Bullhead mouthing off to all and sundry, right on time, a little after 10:15.

Joe started his engine and pulled onto the road. He would meet the truck head-on. He rolled down his side window all the way
and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.
Bullhead’s voice came loud and clear over the CB, with only short pauses for replies.

The blue-and-white rig came into view down a long straight that they had to themselves, waterlogged empty fields beyond sunken
ditches on either side of the road. Joe goosed the Escort and came down the straight at about 80 to meet the tractor-trailer,
which was highballing along at more than 70 itself. Joe reached down with his left hand to the side of his seat and hefted
a red building brick.

West Virginia license plate. As the rig barreled toward him, towering over the Ford, Joe flipped the brick up in front of
its windshield on the driver’s side.

He was doing 80; the rig at least 70. Which meant the brick would take out Bullhead at 150 ph. Be like being hit with a fucking
rocket. They’d have to scrape Bullhead off the inside walls of the cab.

In his rearview mirror, Joe saw the rig leave the road. The tractor went down in the ditch; and the trailer jackknifed, jumped
the ditch and fell on its side in the field. Last look he got, it hadn’t burst into flames or anything dramatic but just lay
there quiet, like some big dead animal.

Joe dumped the New York plates in a pond for safety’s sake, though he was a hundred percent sure there had been no witnesses.
He returned the borrowed Escort and went for a beer.

“Hey, Joe,” the bartender said, “some weirdo called for you awhile ago—said something about the prairie and left a New York
number for you to call.”

When Joe phoned, a recorded voice told him, “This is Andre Verdoux. At the sound of the tone, please leave a message and 1
will get back to you as soon as I can. Au revoir.”

The name Andre Verdoux was enough for Joe to know the score. The tone sounded.

“Andre, this is your old friend from Youngstown. Count me in. Whenever.”

* * *

Lance Hardwick put down the phone in his West Hollywood apartment. He was getting his big break! His opportunity to break
into professional soldiering!

He glanced at the unopened letter from his mother. “Dear Miroslav,” it would begin. She even addressed the envelope to Miroslav
Svoboda c/o Lance Hardwick, refusing to accept his stage name in any form. She was crazy and stubborn as always. Imagine calling
her kid born in Minneapolis by a name like Miroslav Svoboda and expecting they would all go back to live one day in Czechoslovakia
when things changed over there. Yeah, he could admit that his stage name, Lance Hardwick, was as much of a joke as his real
name, but it suited a stuntman.

That was how he had met Mike Campbell. The famous mere known as Mad Mike was a consultant in the shooting of a war movie.
Lance and a few others filled in for the stars every time the action got rougher than toddlers playing in a sandlot. It was
a laugh. In the final version of the movie, Lance and the other stuntmen had more actual camera exposure than the stars who
were credited with the action roles.

Campbell had advised the director on the authenticity of the action shots, so there were no huge globs of plastic explosive
and technicolor blasts fifty feet high in order to destroy a simple bamboo bridge. Neither did the enemy blast away with machine
guns at good old USA choppers and never seem able to hit them only fifty yards away! Mike had insisted on realism, and the
movie had been a huge success as a result of that. Helped along by Lance’s stunts, of course.

Lance had asked Mike outright for a chance to go on a mission. “Look, Mike, you seen me do my stuff here. I know it’s only
stunts. But you can check on my army record. I been a Ranger. I never got to see any action then, either, so it was like being
a stuntman then too. But that wasn’t my fault, was it? Not that I’m loco for a firefight or crazy or reckless, ’cause I’m
not. You seen the way I
handle myself. So far in this movie, I don’t have a scratch; and that fucking director has me practically humping the barbed
wire. You seen I can do what people tell me, exactly like they say, but also how I can think for myself and make suggestions.”
Lance remembered how Mike had let him go on and on like this and then had burst out laughing at him. Lance had been pissed,
but kept it to himself.

Then Mike had suddenly turned serious and said, “I agree it might be good for you to test the real thing against the make-believe.
I think you’d handle it just fine. And I’m a good judge of character.”

“So you’ll give me a chance.”

“I didn’t say that,” Mike responded.

That was all Lance had managed to get from him, but he had never given up hope Mike would call the number he had given him.

Here it finally was! Be in New York City in three days. Call this number when you get there. You will receive instructions.
No word of this to anyone. One hundred thousand dollars will be placed in your bank account. Be sure to make a will.

The
real
thing!

First thing he’d do was something he’d been waiting to do for four months now: feed a lion to the Christians. Stunt work had
been slow. Not slow. Dead. They were shooting movies on location these days, and practically no work was being done in L.A.
In fact, it seemed as though half the movies were shot in Mexico, no matter what their locale was supposed to be. These runaway
productions were supposed to cut down costs. And there was always some local half-assed daredevil ready to perform genuinely
dangerous stunts at almost vanity rates for the sheer glory of it. The producers didn’t need professionals like him anymore,
except when the insurance companies insisted. And they could only insist when they knew what was
going on. And in North Dakota or Chihuahua, no one knew or cared. Muscle was cheap.

Lance had been doing some work as a bodyguard. Mostly for an English rock singer with a luxury place—lawns, walls, fountain,
stables, the lot—in Pacific Pallisades. The guy couldn’t sing concerts anymore because of the bad habits he’d picked up, but
on good days in his private sound studio he could get enough on tape for the sound engineers to doctor. The more the singer
went to pieces, the cleverer the audio technicians became. They kept the LPs rolling, and each LP always delivered at least
one hit single that often went gold or even platinum.

The rock star was a monster when he was having the horrors, and when he wasn’t he was a louse. He paid everyone three times
what they could get for the same work anywhere else, and treated them three times worse than they would put up with anywhere
else. If the singer had a real genius for anything, Lance decided, it was for working up personal hatred for himself in others.

Some months previously, an article had appeared in
Rolling Stone
that put the Pacific Pallisades estate and its inaccessible occupant in a scenario fit for the residence in Paraguay of Dr.
Mengele or some other Nazi hotshot. Guard dogs, electrified wire, electronic surveillance, armed guards, martial arts experts…
His record company picked up on this by putting out a video on the place—the only video to appear on MTV that did not show
a shot of the star musician—and an LP cover to match. The kids took two days to find the place, and carloads began arriving
for beer busts and much more. As often as not, they threw the empty cans over the wall after leaving a message in spray paint.

These were the Christians that Lance intended throwing the lion to. He drove down after getting his call from Campbell, turned
off the alarms, opened the gates and told the kids to call their friends (one of them called a radio
station)—it was open house, he said, as he waved every—one in.

The gate was out of sight of the house, so Lance missed out on seeing what went on. That could not be helped, he reflected,
directing in what had now become a steady stream of cars. It was his gesture that counted.

Although Campbell was often known as “Mad Mike” because of his wild exploits, those who knew him well—those who had worked
with him, put their lives in his hands on a mission—always said Mike calculated his risks better than any other military man
they knew. Campbell himself, always amused and puzzled at why he should be called Mad Mike, had been through the mill. While
in the Green Berets, he had gone on his share of missions under orders of superior officers who did not know enough about
what they were doing. Mike knew the feeling very well of having to obey orders by putting his life on the line against his
own better judgment. He had never refused to obey, but had simply gone out and done what he could in his own way under the
circumstances—and been made a colonel for it in the end. But it had been an arduous journey before he made that rank—though
not long, because he had risen in rank under combat conditions.

The chief reason Mike ran his own merc operation was because that way he knew for sure what he was getting into or staying
away from. If there were any big mistakes, they would be his own; and Mike felt that if he had to die because of anyone’s
mistakes, he would prefer them to be his own.

Things hadn’t always been this clear in his mind. He had worked for others as a merc in Africa, and between assignments there
he had come back to Florida once to make a run to Cuba. He knew the mission was CIA—backed, and it had been hinted to him
that it wouldn’t hurt to have worked for the federal government on a few
occasions if he should ever have future troubles regarding his status as a mercenary. So Mike “volunteered.”

The purpose of the mission was to eliminate a communications expert who was doing his job too well. All Mike had seen were
some aerial photos and the location on the map of the communications surveillance station at which the man worked. He drove
an old yellow Citroen, which showed up in aerial shots in a parking lot between electrical transformers and a dish antenna.
Mike knew the man’s name and had been shown two grainy telephotos of him. He knew nothing more.

Things went wrong from the start. The fishermen who were supposed to pick up Mike and another man from the U.S. Coast Guard
cutter off the north coast of Cuba did not appear. Having been told he could rely on the other man, Cesar Ordonez, for everything,
Mike decided to go ashore under cover of darkness in one of the cutter’s aluminum dinghies. Since they had no time to scrape
off the boat’s Coast Guard identification numbers, they sank it in fairly deep water and swam and waded ashore.

“Where to?” Mike asked Cesar Ordonez.

Cesar looked surprised. “Man, I translate for you and stick with you no matter what, but no more.”

“Shit, I don’t need a translator. I can speak Spanish. You’re a Cuban and this is Cuba. That’s why you’re along.”

Cesar shrugged. “Tell me what you want to do.”

It turned out that Cesar, who Mike understood knew all the details about their target that had not been supplied to him, hadn’t
even been told who or where their target would be.

If it hadn’t been for U.S. government involvement, Mike would have aborted the mission there and then. Not for the first time,
he allowed his love of country to persuade him to undertake what good sense forbade. Cesar Ordonez turned out to be so fanatically
anti-Castro, he was
willing to buck the odds too—just so long as it gave him a crack at a Cuban communist.

They slept in bushes by day and traveled by night till they reached the communications outpost, farther west along the north
coast. The yellow Citroen arrived at 10:00
A.M.

Ordonez grinned. “With the communists, the boss arrives latest.”