The Viper Squad (2 page)

“The guerrillas were here two days ago?”

“They left early this morning,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Those people laughed at the soldiers for running away. They
said to everyone that the soldiers were not real men, that they were cowards because they were afraid to fight the guerrillas.
It’s not good for you to be here with a camera. You had better leave at once. I could drive you back to San Salvador where
you will be safe, for one hundred Yanqui dollars.”

“You’re crazy!” Sally said. “It cost us about three dollars each to come here by bus.”

“Seventy-five,” the man countered.

Sally thought carefully. She decided to say nothing to Bennett about the rebels having been in the town. If she did, she would
never get him to go back to their San Salvador hotel today. This storekeeper was robbing them, but what the hell, money was
the least of her problems.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go now.”

“Momentito. Then I show you something on the way.” He pointed to Bennett. “For his camera. It will cost you twenty-five dollars.
Altogether, one hundred Yanqui dollars. If you have it.”

Sally sighed and produced a crisp bill from her purse.

The Salvadoran whistled in admiration at the unused hundred-dollar bill and slipped it behind the picture of the saint about
to be beheaded. Then he looked through the doorway out into the blazing light of the square and beckoned them.

“What’s happening?” Bennett asked.

But Sally was already out the door.

They moved at high speed along the road in a battered green 1970 Buick Skylark with no muffler, which made the
car sound like a powerboat. A few miles down the road, without easing his speed, the Salvadoran swung off the road into a
set of the tracks across the dust, and the car fishtailed and skidded sideways to a halt. The driver smiled and took off again
from a standing start that spun his rear wheels in the dirt before they found traction and rocketed the car forward.

“Great old V-eight,” Bennett said with approval. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.”

Sally was frightened that if she translated this for the Salvadoran, he would be encouraged to show off more of the jalopy’s
prowess. She pressed her hands against the dashboard, figuring that two broken arms were preferable to a face disfigured by
a splintered windshield.

Round the base of a small hill, they came to the town’s garbage dump. The set of tire tracks swerved into the garbage.

“It looks worse than it smells,” the Salvadoran said, gesturing expansively at the refuse on both sides of the car. “The sun
dries it out after the birds and animals pick over it. The vultures are slow today. Usually they’re the first ones here.”

He looked around carefully as he drove very slowly, and then pointed to some bright patches ahead that stood out from the
camouflage of weathered garbage. He put his foot on the gas and then on the be as they neared the place. He stopped and switched
off the engine, gesturing out his open side window and watching her face closely.

They were the same ones. The two men in their early twenties; the woman still holding her baby; the toddler now about ten
feet away from her, one knee bent, lying on his back; the boy; the girl; the old woman… they all lay on their backs in the
sunshine with bright red blotches on their bodies. Their arms and legs were at odd angles. Their mouths and eyes were open.

Bennett had stuck his camera out the rear side window and was filming them. Sally forgot to turn on the mike,
which didn’t matter because the only sound to be heard was flies buzzing.

Mike Campbell looked at the sun rise yellow through the blowing sand that beat like rain against the pickup’s steel side and
roof. He bit on grains between his teeth and tried to lick them off onto the back of his hand. The wind howled, and a lone
cactus raised its claw at the sky.

He had pulled the pickup off a ruler-straight road that ran from one horizon of Arizona to the other. On the windward side
of the road, the sand had encroached halfway across the traffic lane. Mike had been waiting for daylight before leaving the
road, because headlights made everything look deceptive and unfamiliar off a paved surface. The desert could be tricky enough
to cross at the best of times.

He switched on the engine, shifted into four-wheel drive and started out across the and waste. A tall, lean man in his late
thirties or early forties, his calm gray eyes contrasted with his restless manner. He had a deep tan, his face was heavily
lined, and he had small sharp scars on his neck and arms. Some of them shrapnel. He fixed on a notch in a distant blue mountain
range as his marker. After some miles, the dead-flat land began to undulate in small rises and dips; and pockets of soft sand
caused the pickup to slew and spin its tires.

The sun climbed in the sky, and the beams of heat from its merciless golden eye would miss nothing later in the day. But now
there was still a chill from the desert night lingering in the air. Mike hoped to make it to the first of the canyons before
the heat grew uncomfortable. He had discovered the network of canyons by chance when some powerful thermals took his glider
over backcountry that fliers normally avoided because of its remoteness. From the air, he had seen the canyons running into
one another like cracks in dried mud, till they ended in the river. What
most intrigued Mike about them was that he had not known they were there.

He left the pickup in the same place he had left it on previous trips and descended the steep side of a gulch down to a dry
streambed at its bottom. Cottonwoods, tamarisks and willows grew among sedges and reeds along the banks that contained only
smooth bone-dry stones. As Mike followed the gulch, its walls grew steeper and closer together, until finally he was walking
along the dry bottom of a cool, dark canyon about as wide as a deer trail. The walls of the canyon were of smooth sandstone
and seemed almost to meet far above his head, leaving only a thin strip of blue sky.

Mike followed this canyon till it joined another wider one, and followed that until it too joined a still larger one almost
the width of the two-lane road he had long since left. Some big thunderheads floated in what he could see of the sky. They
seemed a long distance off. He had explored this far and up some side canyons on his previous visits. This time he wanted
to follow the main canyon, which, unlike the others, narrowed as it went toward the river. As he followed the canyon, the
rocks and debris left on its floor made the going hard. He had covered a long, twisting, relatively easy stretch when he stopped
to listen.

The sound was exactly like that of a subway train approaching in a tunnel. Mike felt vibrations in the ground beneath him
and a great roar echoed down the canyon. He looked back but saw nothing.

A huge snake head of red liquid mud suddenly slithered into view along the undercut sandstone wall of the bend behind him.
The serpent of mud twisted back into the center of the canyon and shot forward with deadly speed to consume all in its path.

Mike had time only to rush to the side and scramble on top of some rock debris at the base of one canyon wall. He avoided
the direct impact of the flash flood, which would
have borne him along, battered him with boulders and ground him up fine along the rocky floor.

The flood swept by, three or four feet deep and almost up to his boots where he stood on the rocks. Then he felt the rocks
shift slightly under him from the force of the muddy water. The canyon wall was smooth above him, without handholds. The rocks
beneath his feet shifted again.

Then the water level rose alarmingly. In seconds, it was above his knees. He hardly had time to think before it was at waist
level. Mike decided not to wait to find out which would give way first, him or the rocks beneath, and he hitched a ride on
a heavy tree trunk floating down what was now a swift, muddy river. This proved not so easy as he thought it would be. The
trunk was old and weathered, without bark or branches—and the water made it slippery to grip and rolled it in his grasp when
he did manage to hold on. He cut one hand. This he could tell by the blood on his skin, for he could feel nothing.

A cottonwood, uprooted by the flood, was carried near him and Mike transferred his hold onto it. Its branches acted like outriggers
and prevented the trunk from rolling in the fast-moving waters. He saw two drowned deer float by.

Mike was a strong swimmer and was not greatly concerned by what was happening until the canyon narrowed further and he was
swept down two chutes of water. He knew he was getting into waterfall territory. Even a small waterfall could stun and drown
him—and he would have no chance at all in a fall of any size. He managed to twist the cottonwood around at a narrow neck so
that it became caught securely between both canyon walls. He clung on and let the water break over him.

Very soon the water level dropped. Almost as quickly as the river had come into existence, it began to disappear. Mike let
himself dry, sitting on the trunk still wedged between the canyon walls but now above the water. When
the flow had diminished to a waist-high stream, he jumped down into the water. He shook the cottonwood tree loose and watched
its journey downstream. Then he walked back the way he had come on dry ground alongside one canyon wall.

He climbed beside what was now a ten-foot-high waterfall—it had been a chute when he had passed over it in the headlong rush
of deep water—and upstream from that he came across another. This one, about fifteen feet high, was of smooth sandstone and
not climbable.

Perhaps he would find an easier way out by following the canyon down toward the river. He climbed back down the side of the
ten-foot waterfall and passed the spot where he had wedged the cottonwood between the canyon walls. If he had not pushed the
tree back into the water and watched it float away, he could have hauled it back up the lower waterfall and used it as a ladder
against the smooth wall of the upper fall. Why had he pushed the tree back in the water? The cottonwood itself couldn’t have
cared less one way or the other, yet it was almost as if he had been apologizing to it for delaying its journey and helping
it on its way again.

Mike continued farther down the canyon along the dry strip by the base of one wall until he came to a dark, misty place where
the water disappeared over the lip of yet another fall. Even before reaching it, he could tell by the comparative silence—only
a distant muffled plunging of water—that he was not going to like what he was about to see! He peered over the edge.

The muddy river shot clear of the precipice and descended in a long, wavering spout to smash into foam on rocks more than
a hundred feet below. The top of the fall, where Mike stood, was an overhang he could have managed with a climbing rope. Beneath
the overhang, the walls were sanded smooth by the abrasives carried along in the water over the ages. Mike turned back.

When he passed the place again where he had jammed
the cottonwood between the canyon was, he was shaken by how close he had gotten to the big fall. His maneuver had been just
in time. Then he grew alarmed about his present situation. It might be years before someone came this way and found his bones.
By then, more flash floods would probably have carried his bones down the canyons to the river, and from the river into the
Gulf of California, to rest on the sea bottom, examined by curious fish, till buried out of sight by settling sediment.…

His pickup, in perfect condition in the desert climate, would be his memorial, the only clue to what had happened to him.

He stood for a while, hopelessly, beneath the smooth was of the fifteen-foot fall, the water shrunken now to the size of a
brook, and he could hardly believe it when he saw a big tree trunk with snapped-off branches protrude a few feet over the
top of the fall and then come to a stop, the flow of water being insufficient to carry it over. The trunk moved again and
rolled; a bit more of the heavy trunk stuck out over the top; then it seesawed a little and at last was eased over the edge.
The heavy end hit the pool at the base of the fall, and the trunk remained leaning against the top at an angle of forty-five
degrees.

Mike scrambled up it and moved on up the canyon, fast—aware of more thunderheads billowing in full sail across the sky.

Lt. Col. Francisco Cerezo Ramirez, of the Treasury Police in the city of San Salvador, shook hands with the army general.
He said quietly, “You may depend on me, Victor.”

“I knew I could.”

The colonel opened the door of his office and showed the general out. An army lieutenant snapped to attention in the corridor
and accompanied his superior officer down the curving marble staircase. The Treasury Police colonel nodded to a bull of a
man lounging in the corridor and left
the door of his office open behind him. The man’s sun—glasses added nothing to his expressionless face, and his loose shirt
flapped beneath his potbelly as he walked. He closed the door after him.

Broad beams of sunlight shone through the floor-to-ceiling casement windows of the huge office and hit one corner of the enormous
rosewood desk. The colonel him—self was quite small, and had a neatly trimmed mustache and a freshly pressed uniform, brightened
by medals and decorations.

“Turco, it seems we have some left-wing gringo spies upsetting our army friends,” the colonel said. “With a movie camera.”

Turco smirked. This was his kind of work.

“Male and female, staying here in San Salvador at the Sheraton.” Lieutenant Colonel Cerezo passed some papers to him. “No
one lays a finger on them till I say so. First we find out what their affiliation is.”

“All they need do to get a press pass is rent a car from Avis.” Turco’s voice was flat and rasping.

“The general thinks this pair has no press credentials.”

Turco frowned. “Peculiar.”

“Find out who and what they are, and what they’ve got their hands on so far.”

“What did the general say they’ve done, sir?”