The Viper Squad (24 page)

T
HERE
was no doubt about who was giving orders now to Major Rafael Chavarria’s hunter battalion. It was Mad Mike Campbell. He and
his team had arrived back in camp the previous evening just as the cooks were about to serve food. The major and the other
officers had already left to dine at the town’s single restaurant. Mike kicked over pots of stew and vegetables, overturned
trestle tables and benches, knocked a sergeant out cold who tried to stand up to him, waved his M16 in the faces of three
companies of soldiers and told them they had some work to do before they ate. He loaded them into the trucks, stopped outside
the restaurant in town and, regardless of rank, packed the protesting officers into the trucks with the men. They were unloaded
at the base of the wooded slope and ordered to climb the path to collect the weapons, ammunition, boots and other equipment
from the rebels the mercs had killed. Neither Mike nor any of his team said one boastful word. They let the results speak
for themselves.

On the way back to camp, the trucks dropped off the officers at the restaurant, while Mike and his team returned
to the camp to eat with the men. Although the soldiers had grumbled and cursed until they had seen the dead guerrillas, by
the time they got back to the camp with the captured weapons, their morale was high and they had a new leader. Campbell was
giving orders now.

Later that night, one of the battalion’s radio operators came to Mike’s tent to tell him he had just heard rebel field radios
on the air. One nearby transmitter had just sent details about the Americans present, had described the guerrilla defeat and
had said the Americans had come to capture a blond woman they believed Clarinero was holding.

“Damn,” Mike grumbled, “I wonder how they got hold of that.”

“They have spies and infiltrators everywhere, sir,” the radio operator said.

Mike crawled back into his tent to get a few hours’ sleep beneath a mildewed blanket on stony soil.

In the predawn darkness, Campbell and the major pored over a map by the light of a propane lamp. The major had gotten over
his rage at Mike’s actions when he had received, the previous night, a personal congratulatory radio message from the general
that credited him with the head count of dead rebels. This was one tide the major was willing to float with. This morning
he remembered that the general had once described Campbell as a “godsend,” and he now saw the wisdom of that description.
So far as the major was now concerned, Mike had only to say the word; and if the major could deliver, Mike would get it.

“The C-130s should be taking off about now,” the major said.

“How many did you get?”

“Two.”

That would be fine. These American-piloted planes were effective in spotting insurgent positions. The major and his officers
all agreed that Clarinero and the rest of his forces would not be far away. Although the comandante was known to split up
his men, and often attacked several
places simultaneously, the various groups never strayed very far from one another.

On two previous occasions, government troops had cut off and liquidated an arm of Clarinero’s forces. Both times, Clarinero’s
main force had counterattacked from nearby and wreaked bloody vengeance on the recently victorious government soldiers.

Mike had demanded that the major call in reconnaissance planes. They would be hearing from them in the next hour if they came
as promised.

“If they come,” the major repeated from time to time for Mike’s benefit.

“If they don’t, you’re going to have to radio the general to find out why they didn’t,” Mike warned him finally.

The major looked more upset about this possibility than he had ever done about fighting guerrillas.

Mike laughed and poked the major in the ribs. “Don’t worry. Soon as we get the girl and finish Clarinero, we’ll take off home
and leave you in peace.”

“God willing,” the major said with a watery smile.

The soldiers had breakfasted and were ready to move out on the trucks; the sun was burning the mist from the tops of the evergreens
in the foothills; and there was still no word from the planes.

“So maybe we gave you some bad advice at times,” Paulo Esteban conceded to Comandante Clarinero.

“Putting our revolutionary funds into Mexican pesos instead of the hated Yanqui dollars certainly turned out to be bad advice,
Paulo,” Clarinero said. “The devaluation of the Mexican peso did our movement more harm than all the Salvadoran government
hunter battalions put together. I think you Cubans should pass on to us some more of all that money the Russians give you.”

“I tell you they don’t give us much money,” Paulo said exasperatedly. “Who the hell wants rubles? What can you
buy with rubles? They give us credit. Credit for what? Russian goods, of course.”

“Which are no damn good.”

“Which are no damn good,” Paulo agreed. “But that’s beside the point. Look, you need five million Yanqui dollars to keep going,
right? You have five million sitting outside in the sun not a hundred yards away.”

“She’s got blond hair and a big mouth,” Manuel put in.

“You’re talking about ransom?” Clarinero asked, clearly annoyed.

“Of course,” Paulo answered.

“She comes to us as a sympathetic observer,” Clarinero said, “and you want me to behave like a common criminal toward her?”

“It’s all justified because it forwards our aims, helps the revolution,” Esteban said smoothly.

“I’m not one of—your communist-party goons, Esteban. Leave her out of this. If I have to, I’ll raid some of the big banks
in the provincial capitals.”

“And lose a lot of men,” Manuel pointed out.

“All to save that peach-fuzz blonde for yourself?” Pablo insinuated. “Seems to me you’re putting your own creature comforts
ahead of the military aims we hold in common regardless of our political views, Clarinero.”

“She’s a friend,” the comandante said evenly. “I don’t turn against a friend because I can gain some advantage from it.”

“I think she’s more than a friend,” Manuel jeered.

“Are you trying to claim you’re not fucking her?” Paulo asked directly.

“None of that is your business,” Clarinero said abruptly. “I am in command here. She will not be held for ransom, and I will
not hand her over to anyone else, either.”

“You’ve been told that these American mercenaries are here to capture her and that they have the support of the general,”
Paulo said, trying to bring back their argument to a conversational tone. “Last evening you lost almost
sixty men to them, more than a quarter of your fighting force. The girl isn’t safe with you anymore, comandante. We will
take her to a more secure environment.”

“I suppose you mean Nicaragua,” the comandante sneered.

Esteban did not reply. He looked out the tent flap at the last wraiths of mist lifting from the trees in the dawn sunshine.

“I think she should be sent out aboard the supply plane,” Paulo said. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

Clarinero jumped to his feet, eyes blazing. “No!”

Up to this point it had been just an argument. The comandante could always ignore the recommendations of his Cuban advisors.
They could criticize him later to the FMLN ruling body, but who cared? There would be some new crisis by then that would make
this look like an unimportant side issue. And once a man had his own armed force out in the hills, he was fully answerable
to no ruling body. But this was different.… Now they were threatening him.

The comandante had set up camp overnight in the trees next to the flat grassy area in the valley bottom where the ammo supply
plane was scheduled to land at daybreak. It was an old American DC-3, said to have been used by Somoza to drop barrels of
gasoline, after he had run out of bombs, on the Nicaraguan capital during the overthrow of his dictatorship. This prop plane
suddenly turned the Cubans’ demands from an annoyance into a real threat. No one was going to take Sally from him!

The comandante calmed himself, sat down again and ran his finger down the list of needed supplies he would give the pilot
for his next run. Let Esteban think he had put the matter out of his mind. He knew what he must do. When that plane landed,
he would take Sally with him to meet it. The Cubans would never dare argue with him in front of his men. His men were loyal
to him and would tear Esteban and Manuel apart with their bare hands if he
told them to. For one wild moment, he thought of forcing the two Cubans to leave on the plane—but then he realized that this
could jeopardize his future supplies from Nicaragua, which were, after all, arranged by the Cubans. He would have to live
with their continuing presence in his camp, but he would keep them in their place.

“I am depressed at the loss of all those good men,” the comandante said. “But I have taken big losses before and rebuilt my
strike force. It’s the waste of human life that makes me very sad.”

Esteban had his pat Marxist-Leninist explanations for all that, and he ran through some of them for the comandante. Then the
three men heard the engines of the prop plane coming in for its landing—in this kind of operation, a plane wasted no time
in circling. It came in and got out again without ever turning off its engines.

“We should go,” the comandante said, about to stand.

Manuel put his finger on one item in the list of supplies. “Look here.”

Clarinero looked.

Esteban caught him behind the left ear with the side of his heavy revolver, and the comandante slumped to the floor of the
tent.

Esteban stepped outside the tent and called, “Sally!” He waved to her to come and stepped back inside the tent.

Manuel was emptying a bottle of ether over a face towel.

“There’s damn all we can do unless we can get a fix on their location,” Mike was explaining to Andre when a radio operator
came at a run to the major’s tent.

“The planes have seen them, sir! About a hundred and fifty men moving across the next valley, but away from us. They saw the
planes, and one fired a SAM-7 missile but missed by a mile. I checked with HQ and they say we have no troops in that area,
sir. So it must be the guerrillas. I have the map coordinates here.”

The major marked the position of the enemy column on his field map, dismissed the radio operator and slumped dispiritedly
in his camp chair.

“They’re inaccessible,” he complained.

“Crap,” Mike said. “If they can go in there, so can you.”

“What about our supply lines?”

“Fuck your supply lines. Make sure every man is carrying a three-day ration of fresh water, his rifle and lots of ammo. Those
are all the supplies they’ll need, and the sooner they wipe out these guerrillas, the sooner they’ll be back here at the camp
kitchen.”

“There’s going to be trouble among the men,” the major said morosely.

“Tell them that I’m just waiting to make an example of the first man who crosses me,” Mike said grimly. “Tell them I’m a pal
of the general’s, and that so far as the general is concerned, I can put any one of them on a spit and cook him.”

The major nodded appreciatively. “They’ll believe that, all right.”

Campbell stopped in the shade of a massive evergreen, looked at his compass and checked the map. “I think we’re right here.”
He pointed out the spot for the major. “What do you think?”

The major had no opinion. He had the unwilling, sulky look of a child being taken somewhere against his will.

“I agree,” Andre Verdoux volunteered. “There’s that range there on our left, so that if we follow this stream it will take
us between these two hills and we’ll end up in that valley west of this one where Clarinero’s men were spotted. Only trouble
is, they were heading north. Where will they be now?”

“I’m guessing they’ll circle back to the west,” Mike said, “and we’ll find them in this valley.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll be suspicious of the way we pulled
out of town so quickly and they’ll suspect a trap,” Mike said. “Why would we just go away and leave the town almost unguarded.
So they’ll hang around here until they get hard information on our whereabouts before attacking the town again. I think I’m
right in saying, major, am I not, that normally your troops would have occupied that town until you had made sure the guerrillas’
main force had left the area.”

“That’s right,” the officer said shortly.

Mike had loaded nearly everyone aboard the trucks and pulled out of camp without a word as to where they were going. Andre,
by this time, had borrowed a field radio and they had monitored outgoing messages to the guerrillas from their spies in the
town. But this time their spies had nothing to tell them except that Chavarria’s battalion and the norteamericanos had gone
somewhere.

Mike was depending on these messages being enough to halt Clarinero’s northward march. Well outside view from the town, he
had ordered the trucks to pull into the hills. Then he had marched the soldiers and his mercs up and down hills and through
forests until he reached where he was now. It occurred to Mike that he was going to look very foolish if Clarinero had not
risen to the bait and had either kept on marching north or gone back immediately to recapture the town. But no military leader
can refuse to act on his hunches for fear of looking foolish. So Mike told himself.

Two-thirds of Chavarria’s hunter battalion had been trained in Panama by U.S. Army sergeants. The battalion consisted of eighty-seven
men plus seven mercs against Clarinero’s 140 or 150. What Chavarria’s side lacked in numbers, it more than made up for in
training. The guerrillas would have the edge on them in dedication and desperation, which in this case were pretty much the
same thing; that made Mike anxious to put the fear of God into the soldiers dealing with him. Neither side had any advantage
in weapons. The comandante and his men would have the advantage in knowing the terrain; but against that,
Mike and Chavarria would have the advantage of surprise—they hoped. Chavarria’s fit of sulks suited Mike’s plans exactly,
since it left him in total control.