The Viper Squad (27 page)

Campbell sat in the front of the truck with the Salvadoran soldier. The others sat in the back of the truck, facing each other
on wooden benches that ran along both, sides. Ordonez sat directly opposite the Cuban.

“You smirk at me one more time, you’ll never get on that plane alive,” Cesar warned the infiltrator.

“I didn’t smirk at you,” the man said. “I didn’t even look at you. You’re just searching for an excuse to break the agreement
we made, so you can kill me. Isn’t it enough for you to have already caused the deaths of four of your countrymen?

“What the fuck are you saying?” Harvey demanded to know, and whacked the Cuban across the mouth with the back of his hand.
“You speak English here, understand?”

The Cuban cowered from him and held his arm before his face. “I no understand you,” he said in English.

“That’s better,” Harvey said approvingly. “I knew you
could speak English if you tried. Just keep talking so we can all understand what you say. I’m tired of listening to goddam
Spanish. Half the people in New York speak it and everyone down here. What’s wrong with English? They all know English, only
they pretend not to.” He turned to the Cuban again. “If you’d talked English all the time instead of Spanish, you wouldn’t
have ended up a goddam stupid commie. Am I right, Andre? Don’t you feel different since you started talking English instead
of French?”

“Very different, Harvey,” Andre said wryly.

Harvey looked satisfied and let his features relax again and his head to nod in motion to the moving truck over the rough
road.

A little later, without warning, Cesar lunged at the Cuban, knocked him off the bench onto the floor of the truck and then
sat on him, strangling him.

Andre jumped Cesar and yelled at Bob to help him. “We follow Mike’s orders,” Andre shouted, and continued to wrestle with
Cesar but could not tear his hands from the Cuban’s throat.

Bob reckoned that what Andre said about obeying Mike’s orders was true—although he otherwise had no objections to Cesar strangling
the Cuban—so he lumbered over and effortlessly swept Cesar’s fingers from around the man’s throat. After that Bob placed his
squat bulky body on the bench between the two Cubans and listened to Cesar grind his teeth in frustration.

T
HE
UH-1H helicopter, crammed with the mercs and their weapons, flew above the scrubby landscape toward the Honduran border.
After they had put the Cuban aboard the flight to Mexico City as promised, Mike wanted to waste no time in getting to the
Salvadoran training camp inside Nicaragua. The longer they waited, Mike reasoned, the less chance they would have of finding
Sally there. General Victor Escandell had wanted to give them a third party at his girl friend’s house to celebrate the deaths
of the four Cubans, but Mike asked instead for a helicopter and clearance for it to land in Honduras. No problem.

“While Andre and I make the weapons pickup,” Mike told the others, “you guys had better get in some R and R in the next couple
of hours. We move out today.”

He and Andre picked up the weapons at what would have been a middle-income suburban house in the U.S. except for the fifteen-foot
wall surrounding it, the steel—plated door entering the compound and the closed-circuit video cameras. As always with a Cuthbert
Colquitt deal, the goods were in order. Mike and Andre started to load them into the Cherokee van borrowed from the general.
The two teenage sons of the house’s owner helped them. They refused the money Mike offered when they were finished, but eagerly
accepted two green track suits with blue lettering: MURRAY HILL TRACK AND ROAD CLUB—unused leftovers from their training days
on the Chesapeake.

As Mike drove away, he said, “It seems like a year ago since you had us running up and down the beach on Assateague Island.”

“We’re all beginning to feel a little frustrated,” Andre acknowledged.

Their heavily laden Huey chopper took some rifle and small-arms fire in the mountains near the border, but suffered only one
direct hit, which punctured a neat hole in a metal plate high in the fuselage. The pilot knew his stuff, and with only a little
searching around, found the Honduran military camp they were looking for and touched down on a landing site at its perimeter.

They were met by twenty-five men in combat fatigues with M16s slung on their shoulders.

“I know these are ‘bad guy’ contras,” Andre said, “but even so, I thought they might look a little more pleased to see us.”

“I suspected we might have difficulties,” Mike said and nothing more.

The “bad guy” contras were so called to distinguish them from the “good guy” contras led by Eden Pastora on Nicaragua’s southern
border. Both contra forces fought the Sandinista communists of Nicaragua, but Pastora’s group had been part of the revolution
and grew disenchanted only after the hard-line Marxists took over. Many of the “bad guys” on the northern border had been
in the dictator Somoza’s dreaded National Guard. Both contra groups were armed and financed by the CIA. Mike had his worries
about what the spooks at Langley, Virginia, might have to say about his mission. According to the media, with the CIA in Nicaragua
anything went—so long as it was against the Sandinista Marxists. Mike had a shrewd
notion that the CIA might not be willing to extend these open-season rules to him, yet he had no choice but to enter Nicaragua
through territory held by the “bad guys.” This large, heavily armed welcoming committee was not a reassuring sight.

One of them was a Cuban, and he and Cesar Ordonez apparently knew each other from anti-Castro campaigns. Mike spotted that
the Cuban was urgently telling Cesar something amid all their greetings and laughter.

In a minute, Cesar drifted by Mike and said to him in an undertone, “Once they get us inside the camp, they have orders to
disarm us and detain us until further notice. The orders are from Washington. My friend says that if we head due south through
this scrubland for about two kilometers, we’ll be in Sandinista territory after we cross a small river.”

“Good work, Cesar,” Mike said. “Do what I do. Pass the word along.”

“Do what Mike does.”

“Do what Mike does.”

Mike stopped and held his stomach. He unbuckled his belt and headed for the bushes.

The sight of each of the gringos being hit with Montezuma’s revenge so soon after arriving on the chop—per cracked up the
contras. They had all heard that the gringos spent half their time squatting on toilets or behind bushes when they came to
the tropics. Even so, it was funny as hell to see them all struck like this at the same time.

It took the contras a couple of minutes to tell and listen to some jokes on this general subject. Then they got anxious when
there was no sign of anyone’s returning from the bushes. They looked for the squatting gringos, found they had been conned
and gave chase.

When Mike heard the hue and cry raised behind them, he called to the team, “We got them beat. Just keep up this pace, watch
where you step and keep together.”

The slope down to the river was gentle, and running through the scrubland was not difficult. The thorns were long and sharp,
but in scattered clumps that were easy to avoid. However, their combat boots left a clear trail in the reddish sandy soil.

They kept up the pace, and the voices behind them grew no nearer, although they did not drop away in the distance, either.
Quite suddenly, they found themselves on the river bank.

“Little river!” Harvey said. “This is a fucking torrent!”

It was true. Although the distance was hardly thirty feet from bank to bank, the river raged in violent foam, and its racing
waters had a hollow, dull roar. They could not hear now how close their pursuers were, but they could not be very far. The
mercs would have to find a way to cross this river.

Upstream a little way, a narrow fallen tree trunk stretched across the river. It looked rotten two-thirds of the way across,
and it was hard to imagine the wood bearing the weight of Bob Murphy or Harvey Waller. They had no rope.

“Let me try,” Lance volunteered. “I’m lightest, and I’m a strong swimmer.”

Mike nodded.

Lance stepped out along the tree trunk above the roaring currents, crossing fast. The trunk gave way beneath his weight, snapped
in two and plunged him into the racing torrents.

Lance disappeared for a moment beneath the swirling waters and then stood up in the middle of the river. The water came to
a little above his knees.

Their fatigues hung soaked with sweat from their bodies, but despite the afternoon’s heat, they made good progress through
a series of foothills. They met no patrols, although the paths through the scrubland looked well-traveled and some of the
wider ones had tire tracks. Every once in a
while, they had to pass through cultivated tracts, mostly corn. They were seen and ignored.

“They figure we’re contras,” Mike said, “and hope we’ll leave them one if they leave us alone.”

This seemed to work out all right. Nobody was looking for trouble. The mercs kept clear of villages, and those houses they
passed close by seemed too primitive to be linked by radio to the armed forces.

Lance shook his head. “I’d heard that everyone in Nicaragua had their own Kalashnikov. These people are too poor to own even
a steel shovel.” They had just passed two men digging in a field with shovels carved from solid pieces of wood. “This place
makes El Salvador look like Beverly Hills.”

“Pity we didn’t do something about it before the communists did,” Mike said. “It may be too late now. But I don’t want you
to forget we’re not here to set wrong right. We’re here to find Sally Poynings—kidnap the silly bitch if we have to. Then
I’m going home.”

They were crossing a group of fields, keeping an eye on a bunch of men working some distance away who hadn’t seen them yet.
They were fired upon from the opposite direction. The shooting was wild, but it was automatic fire. A lone man stood in a
field on higher ground, aiming at them again.

Andre whipped his FN-FAL Paratroop battle rifle to his right shoulder and squeezed off a single shot. The rifleman crumpled.

Now the distant men in the fields were running. Through his binoculars, Mike saw them pick up assault rifles.

“A people’s militia,” he said. “Lance, you’re going to meet some of those just-plain-folks with their own Kalashnikovs that
you were talking about. Eleven of them.”

The workers came charging across the fields to cut them off.

“What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Andre asked.

“I think they expect us to run for our lives,” Mike answered.

When the militiamen saw that the seven armed men continued on their route regardless of their advance, they slowed and did
some talking among themselves. Both sides were well within range of each other, but there was no more shooting yet.

“If they got any sense,” Mike said, “they’ll go back to work and forget about us.”

But the militiamen didn’t. Although they chickened out on a direct assault on the mercs, they now tagged along behind, no
doubt hoping to raise the alarm when given the opportunity or waiting for a chance to pick the intruders off one by one without
having to risk a firefight.

“I can’t allow this,” Mike muttered to no one in particular.

They were walking alongside a patch of thorny brush, and Mike, fast as a shadow, slipped around the other side of it. The
mercs moved onward as if nothing happened, staying bunched together so that one of their number would not be missed. Mike
crouched on the sandy soil behind the thick brush and pulled a British 36 defensive hand grenade from his belt. He had found
the cast-iron pineapple among the team’s weapons at the pickup point. It might have been put there by mistake, but more likely
it had been added for good luck—arms dealers had their superstitions, too.

Mike found himself a hollow in the ground, since this grenade created a bit of a problem—it weighed about a pound and a quarter,
and its throwing range was only about ten yards, yet its range of fragmentation varied from twenty-five yards on soft ground
to about two hundred fifty yards on a hard surface. In other words, if the man who threw the grenade with its four-second
delay didn’t find protection within that time, he’d get his ass blown off. And it was a sturdy little British machine that
delivered the goods.

Mike pulled the safety pin and held down the safety lever. The red crosses painted at the top of the pineapple pattern signified
this was a high-explosive model.

He heard footsteps on the other side of the thorn scrub. He waited till they were directly opposite him, lobbed the 36 hand
grenade over the top of the scrub and threw himself into the hollow.

It seemed as if the grenade blew in even less than four seconds. Its fragments of hot metal tore their way through the thorn
scrub, showering him with twigs. Mike sat up in the hollow and emptied the forty rounds in the magazine of his Uzi submachine
gun. He fired in short bursts through the thorns where he thought any survivors of the blast might be standing.

Two of the team used their battle rifles and then stopped. Choking dust and smoke filled the air. Mike could barely hear sounds
because of his ringing ears. He figured it was safe for him to get up and walk around the thorn thicket to take a look.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. Half of them were still alive. Jagged fragments of cast iron, traveling outward in all directions
from the grenade blast, had tom through their body tissues. These fragments had not entered the flesh in neat holes as streamlined
bullets did, but gouged their way in, turning end over end as they seared and broke apart muscle and bone, until the body
itself absorbed all their impact and they came to rest deep in the tissues, or they exited from the body on the other side,
leaving a gaping hole even larger than the entrance wound.

A few had been hit by bullets also—those who had not immediately fallen or who perhaps had escaped the deadlier grenade fragments.