The Viper Squad (32 page)

Joe, Harvey and Bob sat quiet and watchful, not missing a thing, their eyes roving to and fro, their hands
resting very casually on their weapons. This was enemy territory. No one was going to take them by surprise.

Sally and Mike chatted and laughed while Lance fumed. Andre sat back and enjoyed it, as he always did when an older man beat
out a younger one for the affections of a lady.

The mercs spent a tense half hour in the station at Matagalpa and were relieved when the train pulled out of the large market
town. A ticket collector appeared and asked Mike if they wanted to go all the way to Managua. He said yes, and bought seven
tickets, although the Nicaraguan capital was the last place on earth he wanted to be.

The radio still kept them informed. As yet, there was no mention of Sally or the team, but they did learn that the volcano
was becoming increasingly active and that the entire area around it had been evacuated because of the danger of showers of
hot cinders. A man in the seat back of Mike was telling someone they would be able to see the volcano from the train in a
couple of hours.

Mike found the volcano on his map, and he and Andre estimated the area cleared of people and circled it with a ballpoint pen.

It was mid-afternoon. when they finally saw the volcano. A long ridge of high volcanic cones, some with their tips missing,
stretched off into the distance. The top half of one cone was hidden by a huge cloud of black smoke that drifted miles eastward
into a widening tail. Mike waited till the train was at its closest approach to the mountain, by which point interest among
the other passengers had long since waned. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes were common happenings in Nicaragua. So too,
apparently, were armed Russians on a train. The people may not like any of them, but they had to live with them.

Mike jerked his thumb out the window. Time to go.

  *   *   *

El Salvador looked like the Garden of Eden in comparison with this part of Nicaragua. It was less populated here than in El
Salvador, but the poverty was much greater. The hillside villages were picturesque in spite of their harsh primitiveness,
or perhaps because of it; their ancient thick—walled churches half-tumbled by earthquake shocks, open sewers on cobblestone
streets, revolutionary slogans painted on sagging walls. “No passaran!” was scrawled everywhere—meaning “They shall not come
through!” and referring to the U.S. Marines, who apparently were expected any minute.

They were seriously challenged only once, by a small, spectacled man in a blue shirt who was with an armed civil defense committee
patrolling a village they were circumnavigating. The man shouted something at them. When they did not reply, he repeated it.

“Sounds like Russian,” Mike said.

“Let me handle it,” Lance offered. He shouted some—thing in a foreign language across the field to the man, and he responded
in that language enthusiastically and began to come to meet them.

“He speaks Czech, Mike,” Lance said. “I can handle it, but what about all of you?”

“Go to meet him before he reaches us,” Mike said. “Tell him we’re in a hurry. Say we’re geologists.”

“I don’t know the Czech word for that. My mother spoke to me in Czech all the time, but she never once mentioned geology.”

Lance met the man midway, talked with him for a few minutes and then hurried back.

“I told him we were Czech agricultural experts here to gauge the volcano damage so our government could send aid. As soon
as he heard the word ‘aid,’ he told us we could go where we liked so far as he was concerned but that we’ll need a clearance
from the army up ahead to enter the danger zone.”

Lance showed Mike a travel permit the man had given him. From this point on, when they ran into various armed
civilian patrols, Lance did the talking in Czech with some Spanish words thrown in and displayed their travel permit. A lot
of Czech and almost no Spanish seemed the best formula. As in every communist country, a certain percent—age of the population
was employed in running surveil—lance on the rest, and there seemed to be armed cadres of the dedicated all over the place
to prod those who were less enthusiastic about their socialist paradise. These cadres were the big shots locally, but they
always backed off in respectful awe when Lance spouted Czech at them. Maybe they thought it was Russian.

The mercs began noticing people on the hill paths driving burros loaded with pots and bedding, obviously refugees from the
evacuated area. As the mercs neared the base of the smoke-shrouded mountain, they were passed by army trucks filled with people
and their belongings. At this altitude, the ground was open—or at most covered with low evergreens—so that there was no way
they could hope to sneak through the army checkpoints they saw ahead.

“Just keep walking,” Mike said. “We’ll aim for the midpoint between the two checkpoints.”

As they walked through, they heard shouts. Finally, a Russian-built imitation Jeep bounced across the rough ground toward
them. Lance stopped to meet it while the others walked on. He rejoined them shortly, and the vehicle returned to the checkpoint,
but Lance seemed less than contented.

“I gave him the bit about Czech government aid and I think he understood me, though he spoke only Spanish. But he’s one of
these pushy young going-somewhere-in-a-hurry officer types. He said he would have to radio in to HQ to get verification on
us. I told him not to bother; that we’d been approved and could not be delayed. I bet the little fartface radios in all the
same and finds out no one has ever heard about us Czechs out here. Better not let them see us quicken our pace, guys.”

Mike said nothing. They were now well uphill of the army checkpoints.

“What I can’t understand,” Sally said, “is why they don’t put out an a11-points bulletin or whatever you call it.”

“Then they’d have to admit you were in Nicaragua,” Andre said.

Mike plodded uphill silently. The light was noticeably darkening as they climbed up under the cloud of smoke which had appeared
black from a distance, but which they could now see comprised all sorts of olive, green, yellow and even purple coiling smoke
as well as black and brown.

“You wouldn’t live ten seconds trying to breathe that smoke,” Andre said loudly for Mike’s benefit as they climbed nearer
to the dense cloud.

The smoke rolled down the slope high above them and then lifted off to hover over their heads. Mike kept climbing in a steady,
preoccupied way.

They heard a volley of shots from downhill.

“Don’t look back,” Mike said. “Just keep going like you haven’t heard a thing.”

Another volley of shots.

“They’re still only shooting in the aft,” Andre said, with a hint in his voice that they might not continue to do so.

“Keep going,” Mike said. “That officer has probably made a radio call, like Lance said he would, but he can’t be sure yet
who the hell we are. And he doesn’t want seven dead Czechs on his hands because somebody at HQ goofed and forgot to mention
they were here. He’ll be up to talk with us again. When he comes, I want you to drive, Joe.”

“What?” Nolan asked.

“You heard me,” Mike snapped.

Sure enough, a half minute later they heard the imitation Jeep laboring up the slope after them.

“Talk to him, Lance,” Mike said. “Get him away from the vehicle.”

Lance led the zealous officer away from the Soviet Jeep and launched into fluent Czech expostulations, with occasional Spanish
phrases thrown in to further mystify him. Apart from the driver, two Nicaraguan regulars remained in the vehicle and covered
the team with a Soviet PK machine gun. These two would be hard to fool.

Lance was smiling and shaking hands with the officer, who seemed a bit confused and unhappy. Lance shouted at the three Nicaraguans
still in the Jeep and gestured at them to get out. They looked at their officer, who nodded his head uncertainly. Lance spoke
volubly to Mike and the team in what they assumed was Czech and gestured for them to get in the vehicle. Harvey settled in
behind the machine gun. As Joe Nolan drove away, Lance looked back and waved to the Nicaraguans.

Manuel had never seen Paulo in such a rage. Manuel was often afraid of Paulo, even when he was in his sunniest moods, so that
now with Paulo’s face gray from exhaustion, his eyes bloodshot, his huge frame trembling with fury, Manuel sent a quick prayer
to the Virgin that he was not the one who was at fault.

Esteban stubbed a forefinger on the map spread before him. “What do you see there?”

Manuel looked. “Mountains? Ah, that volcano which became active, where they evacuated those people.”

“What would you say to seven armed Czechs in that area?” Esteban asked.

“Czechs? I don’t think so. You’re sure they’re not Russians?”

“Czechs.”

“I don’t think so,” Manuel repeated, trying not to cause offense.

“What if I told you that one of the seven was a blond female?”

Manuel’s jaw dropped.

Esteban went on, “What if I also told you that an officer
of the Nicaraguan army lent them a vehicle and a PK machine gun?”

“Santa Maria.”

When they woke at dawn, they all felt queasy from the noxious fumes they had been breathing ever since arriving at the volcano.
While daylight held, they had driven south around the volcanic cone at a level higher than its base. They used the meager
shelter of the Soviet Jeep in which to sleep—except for Harvey, who claimed it would be an easier and quicker death to be
caught in the open by a shower of hot cinders from the crater above them. Al—though the earth trembled periodically throughout
the night, there was no fire and brimstone—only headaches from the fumes in the air, as if they had drunk and smoked too much.

The coiling smoke cloud still hung above them like an enormous thunderhead about to release a deluge, and the early morning
daylight had that eerie brightness often associated with an approaching thunderstorm. The mountain slope was bare and exposed
except for scraggy grass. There were no hiding places here, not even cover from attack. They understood now why Mike was keeping
them higher up the slope than they thought healthy—that black cloud was their protection from the air.

But the cloud was not low enough to prevent choppers from coming in and searching for them. They heard their engines and then
saw them before they were sighted themselves. A gunship tried a flyover from their rear. If the barren ground gave them no
protection, it also made sneak attacks on them impossible. Harvey lay on the floor of the Jeep, and his machine gun spattered
7.62 mm bullets at the oncoming chopper. Its glass cowling shattered, and the pilot took the craft nose-up into the smoke
to avoid the PK’s bullets.

The chopper came down into visibility again a few
hundred yards downhill from them. Its door gunner scraped paint off the Jeep’s hood as he raked them with fire.

Harvey returned fire from the bouncing vehicle, and they saw the door gunner fall back into the chopper’s interior and his
machine gun swing loose on its mount.

Waller’s Russian gun had a 250-round square belt box and a cyclic rate of 650 rpm. He gave the chopper everything the PK had
to give. The helicopter skewed sideways like a horse hit hard with a whip, and then kind of shuddered and sounded like a broken-down
truck, till suddenly it dipped its nose and bit the dust.

They saw the chopper lie on the ground for a half second before it was consumed in a great fiery ball, which made Harvey whisper
“Goddam” in awestruck admiration, like a connoisseur of beauty before a perfect work of art.

Two other helicopters made a wide swing around them, well out of the PK’s range, which Harvey figured at about one thousand
yards. The choppers came down about a mile ahead of the mercs but could not touch down safely on the steep mountain slope.
Instead, each chopper rested one skid on the uphill side, with the second skid hovering in thin air, and unloaded airborne
assault troops. The two choppers lifted off as the soldiers spread quickly up and down the slope to intercept the approaching
vehicle.

Once they came in range, Harvey fired a machine-gun burst over Joe’s head as he drove the Jeep, and four or five of the Nicaraguans
went down like ninepins.

After that, the Nicaraguan assault troops lay in the grass and waited, invisible. Joe Nolan slowed and waited for Mike’s instructions.

“Stop,” Mike said.

Mike decided to make a vertical downhill run from where they were and then continue cutting around the base of the mountain.
This would add a lot of miles to their journey and open them up to who knew what kind of
troubles away from the smoke cloud’s protection and out of the crater’s danger zone.

Mike was just about to tell Joe to make the downhill turn when he saw the assault troops ahead jump to their feet and start
running downhill. Some of them dropped their rifles; others looked fearfully behind them.

“Push on!” Mike yelled to Joe, who threw the fake Jeep into gear and lurched forward.

They were making good speed across the bumpy, grassy terrain, and the Nicaraguans were too busy running from whatever ailed
them to intercept the mercs, when Joe saw, directly ahead of the Jeep, a long ribbon of moving gray stuff that steamed like
cooked oatmeal.

“Lava!” Mike shouted.—

Joe turned the steering wheel, brought the Jeep sharply about and drove alongside the moving lava. They saw now that this
was just one of many fast-moving fingers of a more slowly moving broad front of molten rock descending the mountainside. They
saw too what had terrified the Nicaraguan airborne assault troops, who were still hoofing it downhill before them. The fingers
of lava, moving at the rate of a fast walk, broke without warning into rapidly moving rivulets that rejoined each other farther
downhill, leaving islands of grass cut off by the lava channels.

One soldier found himself cut off on a diamond-shaped island maybe fifteen feet long. He ran its length and, in a spectacularly
long jump, successfully cleared a rivulet of molten rock at its narrowest point.