The Viper Squad (3 page)

The colonel smiled. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by telling you. That’s for you to discover for yourself.”

Turco’s thick lips slowly curled from his green teeth in a grin.

B
ENNETT
replaced the phone. “He speaks real good English,” he said and sank back into an easy chair in their Sheraton room. “He’s
agreed to give me a half-hour interview, so long as we get there punctually at three. After the interview, he’ll take us with
him to some kind of meeting.”

Sally nodded. “Is this Bermudez an old friend of your father’s?”

“An old patient. Every cardiologist keeps a careful record of his patients and tends to follow up on them more than other
doctors do. When my father succeeds in keeping someone with a bad heart alive under unfavorable conditions, he doesn’t mind
taking personal credit for it. When the patient happens to be a politician in El Salvador, naturally my father is doubly interested
in the stresses involved. According to my father’s instructions, I’m sup—posed to question Bermudez about his blood pressure,
pulse rate, medication and diet as well as on political things. Can you believe it?”

Sally laughed. “Remember that crazy reporter the other night? The one who told us why Salvadorans smoke so
heavily—none of them expect to live long enough to develop lung cancer.”

“In the year or so since Bermudez was last in Boston to see my father, there’s been two or three attempts on his life. You
can imagine the mess he must be.”

They had expected the politician to live in one of the wealthy suburbs where the houses were surrounded by high walls. Instead,
their taxi took them to a poor down—town section, one of the few old parts of the city they had seen, where people leaned
on windowsills and sat in doorways.

The taxi driver said, “These people are the best look—outs Senor Bermudez could have. Nobody can come into this neighborhood
without being seen. And if they don’t like the look of you …” He turned about to look at them in the backseat while he drove
and made a noise with his mouth and snapped his fingers simultaneously.

“What’s he saying?” Bennett asked.

“Your friend doesn’t speak Spanish, senora?” the driver asked.

“No.”

“You speak it very well. Better than a lot of us do.”

Sally knew he was referring to her Castilian pronunciation—her European rather than American Spanish. These Central American
men seemed amazed by her blond gringa appearance and grammatical, and to them snobbish, Spanish.

“What kind of man is Senor Bermudez?” she asked.

The driver steered around a peddler’s cart and shrugged. “A moderate. So what can he do? The leftists have guns. The rightists
have guns. The moderates are in the middle and have no guns. Senor Bennudez speaks his mind. You have to give it to him that
he has courage.”

The houses on the next block all had steel mesh over the windows and the doors were fortified by metal plates. In the middle
of the block, one old house was set back from the street behind massive iron railings. Sally paid the driver, and they approached
the building under the impersonal
stares of four men with submachine guns slung from their shoulders. Bennett paused to film them. They did not react.

“Shit,” Bennett said. “I was hoping one of them would at least wave his gun at me.”

“Would you dare go around the Combat Zone, back home in Boston, doing what you’re doing here?” Sally asked crossly. “Like
hell you would. Yet you run around here like you paid the price of admission and now you want to see the show. I tell you,
Bennett, I don’t like the look of these people and they don’t like the look of us.”

Bennett smiled tolerantly and kissed her cheek. “It’s always a little weird and chaotic doing any movie——especially a documentary.
You never know what turn things will take. But that’s what gives the final film its charge—the very same things that drove
its makers crazy while they were doing it. I’m kind of glad you weren’t along for the whale movie. If you’d seen’ those big
bastards breaching right next to our little rowboat, you’d have headed back to port first day.”

Sally looked at the ground, hurt that Bennett could be pleased not to have had her with him then. She had already forgotten
that he had tried to persuade her not to come to El Salvador and that only her knowledge of Spanish and her role as the film’s
producer (that is, financial backer) reversed his judgment that she should not come.

They had to walk around a wall of sandbags to enter the doorway of the building, which led through a large hall—way to a central
courtyard. Here groups of men stood about with rifles and submachine guns. Some had their weapons broken down and were cleaning
the trigger assemblies with oily rags and the barrels with twisted pipe cleaners. No one spoke to them.

“You sure this man is your father’s patient?” Sally asked nervously.

He laughed. “Of course. I want some footage of these
guys. Since you tell me I’m so damn rude or whatever, why don’t you ask their permission?”

She asked the nearest men. Yes, they would be pleased. Caps and sunglasses were adjusted, bellies sucked in, weapons brandished…

“And these are the moderates,” Bennett said as he adjusted the lens.

He was still running the camera when a man about sixty in a white shirt approached, paused in front of the camera with a big
smile and then held up a hand in a friendly gesture to signal enough. Bennett switched off the camera.

“The doctor’s son, eh? How is my old friend in Boston? You are in medicine too, no?”

“No,” Bennett said.

“Good. Then you won’t make me listen to advice about what I should not do. I received your father’s letter that you were coming
to El Salvador. I wrote by return mail to tell him to stop you.”

“I’d have come anyway, even if he had tried to stop me.”

Bermudez frowned for an instant. “If I was a doctor in Boston, no son of mine would set foot in El Salvador.” He looked at
Sally. “Your wife?”

“A friend,” Bennett said.

“I see.” Bermudez’ voice was cold and he looked away from her. She was dismissed.

Latin pig, Sally thought.

“My schedule has changed,” Bermudez said. “Meeting first. Then interview. Come.”

They followed him through the hallway to the door to the street, along with a dozen of the gun-toting security men. Two vans
were now pulled up in front of the building.

Bermudez gestured apologetically at the gunmen. “I try to be a man of peace as much as possible, but each day it becomes a
little more difficult to go the way of nonviolence. Both the communists and the fascists want to kill me.
Why? Because I suggested negotiation and peaceful solutions.”

The Volkswagen van they rode in had metal plates bolted to the inside walls and roof. The window glass had been replaced by
inch-thick clear plastic that Sally assumed was bulletproof.

“I try never to confront them with violence,” Bermudez was saying, “because each time I do so successfully, I become more
like them. That means I have to avoid being attacked, without running away. So I bring my armed security men with me everywhere
without making a big show of it, as others do. And I change my routine every day. Often even I do not know where I will be
in a few hours’ time. That way I stay alive and live to fight another day, no?”

Sally couldn’t help admiring him a little for the way he handled himself, in spite of the fact that he enraged her through
continuing to treat her as if she weren’t there. He’s religious, she decided. He probably saw her as some kind of scarlet
woman. And he’d have his hand on her knee as soon as Bennett looked the other way. She knew the type.

They came to a supermodern high rise, the kind she disliked in Boston but which, for some reason, looked great down here.
Their van and the one following, bringing the rest of the security men, drove into the under—ground garage beneath the building
instead of pulling up before it.

The armed men tumbled out of the second van and looked about among the parked cars in the garage’s cavernous interior. Then
they assumed positions with their guns swinging at the ready, and one nodded to the driver of their van. It was time for them
to get out.

Bennett followed the driver, the two security men next, then Sally, then Bermudez. Bennett panned his camera around the underground
garage, complaining of the or light.

A splatter of what could have been water tore across the
concrete wall behind their heads. The automatic gunfire was deafening in the enclosed space. Bermudez’ security men fired
back, Sally could not see where. She and Bennett crouched behind a car parked near their van, along with Bermudez. There was
a silence after the first bursts of fire. It seemed to goon and on. Bennett was filming. Sally suddenly remembered she had
forgotten to mm the mike on and she knew how mad Bennett would be at her about it. She switched it on.

Some of the security men were running from the cover of one parked car to another. One shouted a warning. They heard a metallic
clatter underneath the van. The car they crouched behind sheltered them from the blast, yet it knocked them to the concrete
floor. Bermudez fell on top of Sally. He kind of grunted and hung onto her.

“Filthy animal!” Sally snarled and tried to lift his unresponsive bulk off her body. She finally managed to heave him off
her and looked up to see what was happening. The van lay on its side, burning, and clouds of black smoke rolled beneath the
low concrete ceiling. There was a long rattling of many guns. Then silence.

Sally heard another metallic scrape. She looked. About five feet away on the concrete floor, a hand grenade spun slowly on
its side. A small iron Easter egg, she thought, cold, malevolent…

Mike Campbell pulled into the oasis of sorts that the trailer park created in the Arizona desert. Mike was a solitary man
in so many ways, he could live right next to folks and not be much affected by them. He might have been happier living in
some tumbledown rancho on a lonely mesa, but his woman, Tina, was having none of that. She needed company, running water,
electricity. Trailer park or mesa, it mattered little to Mike much of the time. It had mattered today. He wanted to be alone,
so he had gone to the canyons. And almost not come back. Which made coming back now very satisfying.

He left the pickup at one end of his mobile home and climbed out, stiff and tired. A retired couple looked at him from their
aluminum lawn chairs, the kind that fold. They usually chose not to speak to him, and they did not do so now.

“He’s covered with dirt,” the woman observed.

“I can see that, dear,” her husband replied.

“Probably been on a drunk for days and lying in a gutter somewhere.”

“I saw him leave first thing this morning, dear. He looked all right then.”

The woman nodded as if this information just confirmed her worst suspicions. “He’s been crawling across the border, bringing
in illegal aliens. Or more likely running drugs.”

“To me he looks like he might just have been running,” the man said.

“Phil, don’t take his part in this.”

“You were pleased enough to be living close to him when those bikers caused that trouble, dear.”

“Even those lowlifes knew enough to steer clear of him.” That was her final word on the subject.

Mike overheard fragments of the conversation because working with heavy machinery in the car plants for years had made Phil
a little deaf and the woman was accustomed to talking loudly with him. Tina had told Mike often about how his actions were
an important part of the camp soap opera that filled in the days for the retired couple. Of particular interest to them was
his source of income. “A man of invisible means,” Phil’s wife liked to intone mysteriously; and she never tired of putting
indirect questions to Tina about him, with transparent hints at mob connections and whatever illegal activity Dan Rather had
most recently spotlighted on the evening news. The only time Tina had become upset with her was when the old dear developed
an obsession that Mike was stealing babies in Mexico for an illegal adoption ring in the States. It had
been a TV special, and she was sure she recognized Mike in one of the shots.

Truth to tell, Mike’s doings were both tamer and wilder than the old girl ever imagined. He had been a career officer in the
Special Forces and had done back-to-back tours in Vietnam. He had been a colonel, already famous as a leader of special missions
and search-and-destroy forays all over Southeast Asia, when he quit the Green Berets in disgust at the fall of Saigon. He
had wanted to go back in and do it all over again, but this time the soldiers’ way instead of the politicians’. Instead he
was told to stay quiet and keep his buttons shiny. So he quit.

He thought he had seen every fuckup that politicians could manage while he was in Nam, but he found a whole new nest of spineless
wonders when he went as a mercenary to Angola. After that he had been in Rhodesia, then Namibia, in and out of Central and
South America, the Middle East, back to Asia. Over the years Mike built himself a rep as a merc to match his legend as a Green
Beret colonel. As always, his concern was to keep away from publicity—to strike and be gone before the dust settled and people
began wondering what had happened.

Mike waved wearily to the old couple decaying in their garden furniture on their miniature lawn in the desert, among the Michigan
shrubs and flowers they forced to stay alive in this alien soil. The ground in front of Mike’s trailer ran to sand, cholla
and lizards. Tina had picked up the empty beer cans.

Tina was fussing with something in the kitchen and barely glanced at him. Yet Mike knew she needed only a microsecond or so
to scan him carefully from head to toe and commit the smallest details to memory. He slumped into a chair.

She stood close before him, handing him an ice-cold can of Tecate. “You have a nice day in the country?”

He laughed and pulled her onto his lap. But she was still suspicious of him, a small, shrewd, pretty woman who
knew all about men’s lies but whose soft brown eyes and soft looks gave away her love for this man.