The Viper Squad (18 page)

“Her father is paying all this money simply to get the girl back from the guerrillas?” the colonel asked next. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else so far as I’ve been told, sir.”

“Is Mr. Campbell a reasonable man?” Colonel Cerezo asked, this time in English. “Do you think he is the kind of man who… who
negotiates with others to get what he wants?”

Lance also switched to English. “It’s not his money, sir. What does he care?”

“Very well put, Mr. Hardwick.”

The mood in the car became almost pleasant after this. Turco passed Lance a cigarette. The colonel gave him a hit on a silver
pocket flask of rum and did not include his henchmen. Lance picked up speed as they roared along an empty road. The open spaces
on both sides had been transformed into vast shantytowns. He saw a suitable place ahead where the high roadside curb dipped
down for an opening to something that had never been built. He checked his safety belt and drove close, then swung his left
front and rear wheels onto the low curb and accelerated hard. The car, a Peugeot, shot forward, and when its left front wheel
hit the sudden rise in the curb at increasing speed, the car was pitched over onto its right front wheel and its back rose
up. The Peugeot teetered on its right front wheel for an instant before flipping over onto its roof.

Lance had done this stunt a dozen times on movie and TV sets, but always with a strong safety harness, a helmet and a roll
bar to prevent the car’s roof from caving in and crushing him.

He braced himself against the steering wheel and pre—pared for the shock of impact that he would receive hanging upside down
by his seat and shoulder belts. The
noise of the roof scraping along the concrete road inches from his head was deafening; the wrenching force of the belts squeezed
the wind from his body; his arms and legs hit hard, painful objects; his neck whiplashed; but he was all in one piece.

Turco was thrown against him, and Lance had to push him out of the way to find the ignition key and turn the engine off. He
released his seat and shoulder belts and came down on his hands and knees on the car roof. There was a smell of burning, but
no smoke. Adolfo’s little automatic pistol with its big silencer lay in front of him and Lance picked it up.

The door on the driver’s side was knocked out of shape and wouldn’t open until he kicked it out. He crawled onto the concrete
roadway and rose dizzily to his feet. One of the front wheels was still slowly revolving. A van was approaching in the distance.
Only a few dogs and very small children stirred in the shantytowns on either side of the road.

Through an open back window, he saw one of them moving inside the upside-down car. It was Adolfo’s back. Lance put a bullet
in it, aiming for the spine but hitting a bit to the right. Adolfo squirmed, and Lance leaned inside, found Adolfo’s head
and sent a bullet into his brain. The silencer made the pistol sound like a burst of air from a high-pressure tire.

Turco was breathing but unconscious. Lance shot him between the eyes and Turco’s mouth relaxed.

The colonel didn’t seem to be breathing. Lance shot him in the left temple, just to be sure. So long as they had told no one
else before leaving their headquarters, his betrayal of Mike Campbell and the others had died with these three.

Lance looked up the road from where he knelt beside the upended car. The van was nearing rapidly. He pulled the Clara Elizabeth
Ramirez Metropolitan Commando posters from his back pocket, hurriedly unfolded three of them and stuffed one into each of
the dead men’s mouths.

T
HE
seven members of one cell of the Clara Elizabeth Ramirez Metropolitan Commando sat on wood boxes beneath the banana-leaf
thatch of a shack in a barranca near the San Salvador football stadium, safe from the interference of outsiders in the densely
populated squalor of the shantytown. As they often did, they were grumbling about having to take orders from a Cuban. They
quieted down when one of the children who acted as lookout warned them of Paulo Esteban’s approach.

The big Cuban shook hands all round and found himself a box to sit on. He bided his time before making his request and went
out of his way to avoid giving the impression that he was the one now presiding over the meeting. But no one was fooled. Paulo’s
requests were in reality direct orders. The Commando members would have to have a very good reason before they could refuse
him. This time they knew they had such a reason and were looking forward to saying no to him. They had no ideological differences
with Esteban—they too were good communists—they were just sick of Cubans telling them what to do.

“What brings you here today, Paulo?” one of them finally asked.

“Comandante Clarinero has a raid set for tomorrow. As you know, the army has been boasting that they have wiped out his force
by bombing his camp in the mountains. They even claim that Clarinero is dead. We want to show the people that not alone is
he alive and well but is still operating at full strength. He will do this by staging a big raid. I will be there with him,
and so I must leave in an hour for the mountains. We wondered if you would escort a BBC television team to the location of
the attack so they can film it.”

Several members shook their heads.

“We can’t help you, Paulo,.”

“We’re too busy.”

“We have have more important things of our own to attend to.”

The Cuban was used to this and did not let it faze him. This was the drawback with all these little semi-independent cells:
although the cells increased security by each being sealed off and thus unable to betray other cells, their isolation promoted
entrepreneurial tendencies, independence of authority and other evils among the members. Paulo had been trained to put up
with such behavior at this stage of the revolution. It would all be very different after they were victorious. These squabbling
Salvadorans would find out then who knew how to run things best. In the meantime they could be soothed with a little flattery.

“I understand how you freedom fighters have matters of great importance to attend to,” the Cuban said. “Those of us in other
groups are comforted to know that in moments of need we can turn to the Clara Elizabeth Ramirez Metropolitan Commando for
assistance. We know we will not be refused. Or that if we are, it will be because of unavoidable circumstances.”

Thus put on the defensive, the members were anxious to justify their refusal.

“We too have a revolutionary action to perform tomorrow.”

“At the latest.”

“It’s more important than guarding a camera crew for that glamour boy, Comandante Clarinero.”

Paulo smiled. “I admit that at times the comandante behaves like a clown, and it’s true he is always too much in the limelight
while men—and women—who achieve more than he does die unknown and unremembered. Yet the revolution needs him. We need him
because foreign journalists know who he is, with his dopey mustache and silly bugle, his wealthy background and norteamericano
education—he is one of the ruling class and they respect that and the fact that he has joined us against his own class. Everyone
in El Salvador knows who he is; and so long as he lives on in freedom and carries on the fight, the government has to admit
it lacks control. So even if you and I don’t like the tunes he plays, we must still listen to his bugle.”

Without exactly saying it, Paulo had indicated to them that he and they were in agreement, as comrades-in-arms, on all the
major things. He coasted on that for the moment.

“You and I are full-time revolutionaries with little patience for the personal failings and weaknesses of others,” Esteban
went on. “But as mature people, we realize that we must work with others who lack our strength and commitment and that we
must transcend both their weaknesses and our own in order to forward our noble cause—dictatorship by the working class.
We
will rule! Nationalist revolutions are only a stage in the struggle. And now, comrades, share with me, your fellow freedom
fighter, your reason for not assisting the rest of us with the television crew.”

“You read about the colonel and the two members of the Treasury Police we assassinated here in San Salvador?”

Paulo laughed delightedly. “Of course. Congratulations. I hadn’t known it was this cell—”

“It wasn’t. No one in the Metropolitan Commando did it. “But your posters stuffed in their mouths—”

“Listen to our story. We had the two Treasury Police rats, but not their officer, on a hit list. We tried but could never
trace them to their homes. They were torture experts and they both worked on Escandell death squads. We have been trying to
kill them for months. We thought we might get a chance at the Ritz Continental, where they had guests at the hotel under surveillance.
It didn’t work out. Last we saw of the two was them leaving the hotel with a norteamericano. They and their colonel were killed
about an hour later. Now listen to this. A van driver who is sympathetic to our cause but is not an active member came to
us when he got off work, which was hours after the killings. He spoke with a member of another cell when he heard that the
Metropolitan Commando had been credited with the assassinations. He had stopped at the scene of what he thought was a road
accident—a car was upside down and a man stood beside it. The man held a gun in his face, a small automatic with a silencer,
and demanded to be driven downtown. This man spoke Spanish but was definitely a norteamericano. The driver described him.
He was the one that Ricardo here had seen leave the hotel with the two Treasury men. This norteamericano killed them, not
us.”

They were all pleased with the look on the Cuban’s face. For once he had no quick and persuasive reply to what they told him.

“What do you intend doing?” Paulo asked.

“Kill this foreigner.”

“Without finding out what he is up to?” Esteban asked.

“This is San Salvador, not the mountains or Usulutan province. We have no power here. How could we capture him alive? He is
not worth such a big risk. We should kill him quick before he does something else.”

Paulo nodded. “That certainly would be a reasonable
precaution. Have you any idea yourselves why he might have done this?”

Ricardo spoke. “To me he looks like a CIA agent. My guess is that the colonel and those two stepped on somebody’s toes in
the power structure and were ordered eliminated. If the CIA did it, there must be some United States involvement.”

“The colonel was not important?” Paulo queried.

“No,” Ricardo replied. “The two plainclothes agents were more dangerous to us than the officer. Cerezo Ramirez was his name—but
nothing to do with Clara Elizabeth Ramirez.” He grinned. “Suppose someone in the government wanted to get rid of them—perhaps
they had discovered something about him—and the politician or army man got the CIA to kill them as a favor to him. The CIA
decided to pick on us as a sure way to conceal their own involvement. What we must do is teach the CIA a lesson that they
cannot play games with us. We must kill their agent. They will understand that.”

“I agree.” Paulo smiled and shook hands with each of them. “I will get someone else to guide the television crew. I must hurry
to the mountains. Good luck to you and your work for the revolutionary masses.”

After Paulo Esteban had gone, Ricardo said, “He’s not such a bad guy after all.”

Lance Hardwick was pleased with himself. The leftist group that had made the posters was being blamed for the killings. They
had denied it, but no one believed them. Campbell and the others would never learn now that he had betrayed them. Lance had
felt a strong urge to boast of his exploit, to take at least Bob Murphy into his confidence, but he couldn’t think of any
way to explain his actions without admitting also that he had betrayed the team. And he had no intention of ever telling that
to anyone. Even at the cost of not being able to brag about what he had done.

Lance had never killed before. He felt kind of sorry for the colonel, but he looked as if he had been killed in the car wreck
anyhow—at least, he had looked dead when Lance put the bullet in his skull. The other two had only gotten what they had coming
to them. He felt no remorse for having wasted them. Lance scratched his balls, glad they were still there.

“What’s delaying Mike?” he asked Joe Nolan. “Why don’t we get going and find this chick?”

“Mike is a planner,” Joe told him. “He knows how to wait and hit at the right moment. But you found that out for yourself
on the Chesapeake.”

Lance laughed. “So we just have ourselves a good time while we can?”

“Yeah. I expect Mike will give us an alert before we pull out, but I don’t know. Hell, we may be tromping around in this heat,
loaded down with equipment, in two hours’ time. I say have a good time while you can, kid. Bad times are sure to come.”

Joe mopped the sweat from his forehead. It was 97 degrees, according to a lighted readout on an office building. Even when
Joe did not move at all except for breathing, he still sweated like a pig. The drops of perspiration ran into his eyes and
stung them. The evening and night were cool, and when Joe had his way, he spent all day in the air-conditioned hotel and hit
the streets only after sundown.

But today Lance had persuaded him, against his better judgment, to take a walk about town. All of them were beginning to get
bored and crazy. They hardly saw Mike or Cesar anymore, and had never once seen Andre since their arrival in San Salvador.
They knew Mike and Cesar were combing the city, trying to buy hard information on Sally Poynings’ whereabouts. So far Mike
had found out she was with a group headed by Clarinero; that she had been thought killed in an aerial attack on his camp;
that later she was reported as having been seen alive. Since Clarinero’s
group was thought to contain at least two hundred men and was now on the move, it could not be hit effectively by a small
team of mercs. They would have to continue to hang loose and wait for the call.