The Marchand Woman

Chapter 17

There was rain. In the cave Cielo sat on a crate chewing on a pencil and watching it flood down like a beaded string-curtain. The radio stuttered at him — a lightning bolt not too far away interrupted the message entirely with a burst of static and then the thunder deafened him to another few words but he had the gist of the message and Julio, switching it off at the end of the transmission, sat back against the wheel of the howitzer and said, “I wonder what drew them off?” According to the wireless message “Butch and Sundance and Etta” had vanished. But Butch hadn’t checked out of his hotel. Did that mean Glenn Anders intended to return shortly?

It was unnerving. He felt entrapped, not only by isolation but also by unknowing.

Julio sat absorbed in something on the jacket of which was painted a lurid creature that looked a bit like a feathered octopus with the head of a vulture, its hues running from silver to electric orange.

Cielo was getting hungry but he wasn’t quite ready to brave the downpour across the distance to the chow tent. It would require a change of boots afterward and he wasn’t sure the others had dried out from the morning’s storm. Fifteen years ago he’d have taken such discomforts as a matter of course but the passage of years had taught him that there were all kinds of ways to prove one’s manhood and that in the end nobody cared much anyway. By now dry feet were more important than demonstrating he was unafraid of the squall.

He awakened stiff from having lain with his bones on the rock cave floor. The rain had quit. Still daylight; he checked the time: 4:10. So he hadn’t slept that long, really. He glanced at Julio. “Want to get something to eat?”

Julio spoke without looking up from his book. “You have an uncanny talent for interrupting me right at the crucial point.” He held up the book so that Cielo could see he was within a very few pages of the end.

Cielo picked up his rifle and went to the mouth of the cave. He had brought down two rabbits with the rifle yesterday, for the pot; he was a hell of a marksman and it was one of the things he still took pride in. The rifle wasn’t a military weapon. It was his indulgence: a Mossberg #800 chambered for 6.5mm Magnums — a walnut Monte Carlo stock and a 6X riflescope sight. Sometimes he used its telescope to look at parrots in the treetops. He never shot one.

He stood a while in the shadows at the side of the cave mouth searching the trees. Right after a rain was a good time to spot birds: They came out to clean themselves and scout for food that might have been exposed by the storm.

Broken clouds sailed by overhead but high above them hung a fat roll of cumulonimbus and he knew there would be more rain. He’d had enough rain up here in the past few days to last him the rest of his life. He knew the rest of the men felt the same way. If the radio didn’t terminate their restrictions soon there would be trouble in the camp. The men were already picking at each other.

Something stirred at the corner of his eyeline. He looked that way, casually curious — saw a man lift himself from the ground and move crabwise, jinking from cover to cover.

¡Chingado!

But he didn’t move — didn’t want to alert the man. Over his shoulder and very softly he said, “Julio.”

In a moment, alerted by his tone, Julio was behind his left shoulder. Cielo said, his voice dropping almost out of hearing, “Look half left. See the acacia? Just beneath it. Wait for him to move again—”

“I see him.” Something clicked in Julio’s hands — the Uzzi, probably; it had been near at hand.

“No shooting yet.” Cielo lifted the Mossberg and fitted his eye to the scope socket. The rain forest came right up close and he had to play it around before he found the target. Behind him Julio was sidling away toward the far side of the cave — standard defense posture: Never give the enemy a bunched target.

How did he get in here past the road guard? Who was on the road this shift? Santos, yes. If Santos fell asleep on his post...

The face of the enemy came into focus and Cielo recognized it and was not surprised. Harry Crobey — submachine gun, grenade belt, backpack.

Crobey was working his way down toward the tents. Cielo took a moment to think it out. It was no good shouting at him to surrender; Crobey would fade into the forest in half a second if he had a chance. On the other hand it was no good killing him cold; there were things Cielo needed to learn from him.

Let him know he’s zeroed in. Harry won’t fight the drop. Deciding, Cielo turned and made a down-pushing motion for Julio’s benefit and Julio nodded, lowering the muzzle of the Uzzi, relaxing. Cielo took aim through the ‘scope and flicked off the thumb safety and fired with casual ease. The racket of the gunshot was earsplitting because of the echoing walls of the cave.

The bullet spanged off the treetrunk against which Harry Crobey had paused. Cielo stepped out into the open jacking another cartridge into the chamber, shouldering the rifle again and training it so that Crobey could see the telescope and measure his chances. Over to one side Julio walked out showing the Uzzi.

Cielo saw Crobey’s eyes move from one to the other. A heavy bleakness hooded Crobey’s lids; he stood up with slow resignation, dropping the submachine gun out to one side.

“Come on up, Harry.”

With Crobey limping between them they went down into camp and ushered him into the radio tent. Since they’d moved the radio up to the cave to protect it from the cloudbursts the tent had fallen into disuse. It was a good place to have a private talk with Crobey.

Some of the others had heard the shot and come outside to have a look. It was starting to rain again — big slow drops; in a few moments it would pour. The men clustered around. Crobey had trained most of them and there were a few hesitant smiles until Cielo said, “Scatter yourselves. Martin, go down the road and see what’s become of Santos, Villasenor — a couple of you scout up through there, find out if he was alone. Look for tracks.”

Vargas loomed. “Harry?”

“Hello, Vargas. Time you went on a diet, innit?” Crobey grinned — or grimaced.

Cielo pushed him into the radio tent. Julio came in after him and held the Uzzi on him while Cielo stripped him of backpack and grenade belt. Looking through the backpack Cielo discovered a dozen pairs of handcuffs. He used two of them on Crobey and when the prisoner was snugged down Cielo said, “I didn’t think you’d turn against us, Harry.”

“I didn’t think you’d take up murdering innocent hostages,” Crobey replied.

Cielo made a face; he’d had a feeling that might come back to haunt them. “An accident,” he said, feeling a need to set the record straight. “It wasn’t our doing. An outsider — a mishap.”

“Emil Draga?”

A shrewd guess, Cielo thought, but only a guess. It didn’t surprise him that Crobey knew the name. Crobey had been born a few minutes ahead of the rest of the world. Cielo fixed a dismal stare on him. “You seem calm about this.”

“Well I might throw a fit and tear my hair if I thought it would help any. Is this all you’ve got? Eleven chaps? Hardly seems enough for an invasion of Havana.”

“How many of you out there?”

Crobey said, “That’s for you to find out.” He was smug.

Cielo poked around in the backpack. Chemical Mace. The grenades on the web belt weren’t fragmentation, they were tear gas. The only thing Crobey had been carrying by way of a deadly weapon had been the submachine gun; there were only two thirty-round spare magazines for it in Crobey’s belt.

So he wasn’t prepared for a firefight.

Cielo brooded at his prisoner. Crobey smiled cheerfully back but Cielo wasn’t ready to be fooled by it. Crobey was clever that way and the smile could mean anything.

“May as well give it up,” Crobey said. “You’ve been found, haven’t you?”

“Who told you to look for us here?”

“I found it in a horoscope.”

Julio was nervous. “What shall we do?”

“Man the radio. If there’s a force after us we’ll be told of it. Post a few men in the forest — give them rain slickers. Spread everyone else out. And stay by the radio. Go on — leave me the Uzzi.”

“Shouldn’t we get out of here?”

Cielo watched Crobey’s face. “I don’t think there’s any need, Julio. I think he came alone — I think he’s on his own. Working for the mother of that dead boy.”

Crobey grinned at him and Cielo had to smile back; Crobey had that sort of infectious way.

“How can you know this?”

“Look how he came armed. He wanted to wait till we all sat down to supper — then pop a few gas canisters into the tent and put handcuffs on us all. Harry always liked to be a one-man air force, remember? Now he’s a one-man army.” Cielo shook his head in mock disappointment. “We’re all much too old for this, Harry. Five or ten years ago you wouldn’t have exposed yourself that way.”

“You’re probably right about that,” Crobey agreed.

“Go on, Julio. I’ll be all right.”

“But—”

“Am I the leader here?” he demanded.

“But what if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong, am I, Harry?”

Crobey only smiled; finally Julio departed.

Cielo said, “You’d like us to panic and clear out, wouldn’t you. Then you could confiscate our little arms dump and put a stop to our intentions quietly, no fuss, no headlines — the proper way to support the détente between Washington and Havana. Where’s Glenn Anders, Harry?”

If the question surprised Crobey he gave no sign of it. “I don’t know,” he said.

“When did you see him last?”

“I don’t rightly recall.”

“I suppose I wouldn’t answer questions either if I were sitting where you’re sitting. It won’t help you to talk, will it — you have to assume we’ll kill you either way.”

“You won’t kill me right away,” Crobey said. “I might come in handy as a hostage.”

Chapter 18

She soaked small wads of cotton in the last of the witch hazel and placed them on her eyes and tried to relax. She’d only slept in fits and starts for the past two nights and it looked as if this one would be no different. At midnight she’d gone around the house checking the restraints on the two prisoners — Emil Draga in the front room and Stefano, who was small and ruddy and middle-aged and not frightening at all, in the bedroom. He had a fuzzy mustache and comical buck teeth and a wart on his lip and he told amusing stories about his family in south Florida. It was Stefano who had told her the sequence of incidents that had climaxed in Robert’s death.

And these, she thought, were the terrorists who had so exercised her.

She had spent a great deal of the past twenty-four hours resisting what Stefano had told her. She did not want to believe any of it and it was quite possible Stefano was lying: He had every reason to coat the truth with opaque paint. He claimed he didn’t know which man had actually shot Robert.

Robert...

Before dark she had made sure all the lights were extinguished. Now, making her hourly rounds, she carried the revolver into the front room and had a look at Emil Draga. The smell of his sweat clouded the room. He seemed asleep. She went back to the kitchen. The waiting had gone far past dragging on her nerves; it had numbed her. She drank coffee and sat with her hands flat on the table, drooping in the humid heat, listening to the rain drum against the roof. It must be two or three in the morning. She had the jitters but attributed that to the coffee; fatigue prevented her from stirring. This afternoon she’d gone into the bathroom and studied herself in the mirror and judged she must have added a minimum of five years to her visible age in the past week’s time. I look older than Harry does.

It didn’t matter. She’d taken three showers today but nothing helped. She felt sticky — the heat perhaps, but a Freudian would have found interesting speculations in that persistent feeling of un-cleanness. You see, Doctor, I feel like Lady Macbeth.

Was it possible that one day — if she lived to be old enough — she would be able to forget this nightmare aberration? The absurdities of it piled up one upon the next and she could not cope with them any longer. She cast a dulled eye at the coffee cup between her hands. Harry, come back here and take me away from all this. I’ll show you Las Vegas and Palm Springs and we’ll never be without Dewar’s and cologne and clean sheets again.

It had gone beyond the unreality of a dream. It had become the unreality of a failed movie: The kind where the director, the producer, the writer and each player in the cast had a completely different notion of what the movie was about. The sort of movie — A Touch of Class came to mind — that started out as a farce and ended up a dreary melodrama.

Something alerted her. She snatched up the gun and went to the window, stumbling against the sink in the dark. Nothing out there but blackness; the rain pummeling the house. She felt her way to the corridor and looked both ways. She’d left the twenty-five-watt light burning in the hall closet, the door open two inches, and it threw a bit of light both ways, enough to see the hall was empty. She looked in the bedroom: Stefano smiled, his buck teeth glistening in the soft light. She went on to the front room and Emil Draga was tugging petulantly at the handcuffs and he wasn’t going to strip them off over those big knobby hands and she left him to it, prowling back through the house, wondering if perhaps it hadn’t been merely the faint metallic struggle of Emil’s manacles.

The back door began to open.

She lifted the revolver in both hands and pulled the hammer back.

“Don’t shoot me.” Glenn Anders stumbled inside, nearly capsized, shoved the door shut behind him and stood swaying, dripping, an apparition. A puddle formed at his feet and began to spread, soaking into the floorboards. “Don’t shoot me.”

She kept looking past him, looking for Harry. She lowered the gun slowly, easing the hammer down, waiting.

“He’s not coming.” Anders, visibly in the last stages of exhaustion, lifted both hands a few inches from his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “I’m alone.” Then he staggered past her, pushing himself along the wall with both hands, lurching into the kitchen. She heard the muted crash when he dropped into one of the chairs; its legs scraping the floor. She went in and Anders’ arms slid out across the table, knocking the coffee cup off — it shattered on the floor and Anders dropped his head onto the table.

For the longest time she only stared at him. Then with somnambulistic deliberation she opened the refrigerator door and propped a chair there to keep it open. The light exposed Anders’ profile and she saw his eye was swollen almost shut and scabbed with blood.

He muttered, slurring the words so badly she could barely make them out, “They didn’t spot me. I don’t think they spotted me. They were banging around up there, looking for tracks I guess, but it started raining again, harder than hell and I’m sure that must have washed my tracks out. They didn’t follow me. I guess they think he was alone.”

In a fury she snatched a handful of his hair and jerked his head up off the table. Anders whimpered. She threw him back so that he sat more or less upright in the chair. Now she could see his face clearly for the first time: His eye was a mess and something had clawed great red welts down his cheek.

“Where’s Harry?”

“They took him...” She watched him gather himself with a terrible effort of will. “He was alive the last I saw of him. I heard a shot — by the time I got to where I could see through the jungle they were marching him down into the camp. He was limping but then he always limps. I don’t think he was hurt. They’ve captured him, see. I guess they’ll work on him till he talks. We found the guard they’d posted on the trail, you see, we hit him with Mace and handcuffed him to a tree with a gag in his mouth and then we went in to scout the place but one way or another Harry got unlucky and they spotted him. I don’t know how it happened, I didn’t see it. I was still back in the woods and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for him, there were eight or ten of them scattered around the camp and mostly they had guns. I thought about shooting the camp up, driving them to cover and giving him a chance to run for it but Harry can’t run with that leg of his and it just wasn’t any use. Honest to God I’d have tried if there’d been any chance. But what was the sense of getting myself killed if it couldn’t do him any good? I got the hell out of there, didn’t make any noise at all...”

“He’s alive?”

“He was the last I saw of him.”

“Were they hurting him?”

“Not that I saw. Nobody was beating up on him or anything. They had him at gunpoint — they took him prisoner.”

“What happened to your face?”

“I got lost in the dark. Slipped in the mud and fell into a goddamned cactus. I can still see — it didn’t blind me, maybe it looks worse than it is. But Jesus, I feel sick as a dog.”

“Why don’t you see a vet,” she said with a violent contempt. She wheeled away from him and kicked the chair aside and slammed the fridge shut and tried to think.

She tried to cleanse the wounds on his face. She found a small bottle of iodine in the bathroom and boiled up a pot on the stove and dropped a torn section of bedsheet into the boiling water, retrieved the cloth with a fork and let it cool a bit and then went at his face with it, not as gently as she might have; she was disgusted with him.

A chip of light came in from the hall closet. It was all the light she wanted; she was afraid of attracting attention to the house. When she finished her ministrations she painted his face with iodine. Here and there he was still oozing droplets of blood but that would stop soon. She let him keep the wet cloth to dab at himself.

He said, “We’ll have to go to the police. We’d better get moving — the longer it takes, the less chance Harry has.”

When she didn’t answer he took it as a sign that she hadn’t heard him. “We’ve got to call the police. There must be a phone in that village we came through. Listen, they’ll keep Harry alive a while but in the end they’ll find out what they want to know from him, or they won’t find out but either way they’ll kill him, won’t they.”

There was a plea in his tone. She perceived that he had gone up against something, up there in the jungle, and it had cracked him open; he wasn’t much good for anything now.

Anders touched his face with the cloth. When he took it away he looked at the dark stains and winced like a galley slave. Then his face collapsed into defeat. “I’ll stay here if you want to go call the cops.”

His voice set her teeth on edge. She turned half away from him, trying to think, frowning, snapping her thumbnail against her front teeth.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Anders muttered. “Who’s going to care. Harry hasn’t got a family. Just another funeral nobody’ll go to.”

He’s got me. “Shut up, let me think.”

“What for? Call the cops.”

She was trying sluggishly to reason it through. Finally she said, “That’s not the way.”

“What are you talking about? We know where they are now. I mean I can lead the police right to them. And they’re not going anywhere — they think Harry was alone, they think nobody else knows where they are.”

She was ready to retort but when she looked at him she knew it would be pointless. He was far gone past the edge; she had no idea how long he might have gone without sleep but in any case he was in shock, shivering as he slumped stuporously in the chair; berating him would serve no end.

She said, “Listen to me, Glenn. Can you follow me?”

“Yeah — barely.”

“If we take an army of police up there Rodriguez will make a bloodbath of it and Harry will be the first casualty.”

“Harry’s dead already, breathing or not. There’s no way to get him out of there now. At least we can end this.”

“Maybe you’re ready to kiss him off just like that. I’m not.”

Anders tried to get to his feet. “Then if you won’t do it I will. It’s my job—”

“This is a marvelous time for you to suddenly remember your responsibilities.” She snatched up the revolver.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“And you’re out on a limb. I may even be able to save your ass, Glenn.”

“What the hell do you think you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to get Harry out of there.”

His bitter laughter followed her away down the hall.

Chapter 19

At daybreak it was still raining when she brought Anders and Emil Draga out of the farmhouse. Draga’s feet prodded the earth tentatively; he was still blindfolded and manacled. Anders rubbed his jaw and came to a stop when he reached the Bronco. “What now?”

“Get in. You drive. You know the way.”

“Up there?”

She pushed the Cuban into the back seat and wasn’t particularly gentle about it: Rage swirled in her and Emil Draga was the nearest available target.

Anders stumbled. He reached for the door handle for support. The bruise around his eye was big, dark and ugly. He looked half dead. It was more than just the physical injuries; probably he was suffering from some sort of shock not to mention exhaustion and fear and dejection. She didn’t know anything she could do about it except snap at him to keep him awake and functioning.

“Go on — get in. You can drive.”

“I can try,” he muttered, and hauled himself up onto the seat.

She went around and climbed in and sat sideways with her gun and half her attention on Draga. He sat twisted awkwardly because his hands were cuffed behind him. But he was a big brute and his feet were free now and she didn’t trust him to stay still.

The Bronco lurched uphill and she sat in a chilled fury with the revolver in her fist, thinking it out. They had Harry up there — hostage or dead. Very well. Now she had a hostage, too. They’d have to tread easy where Emil Draga was concerned: The power of his grandfather’s wealth would force them to take no chances with Emil’s life and as long as she had her gun to his throat she could go among them and stay alive long enough to get Harry out if Harry was alive. If Harry wasn’t alive she’d use Draga as her shield to get out of there and then, she thought, God help me I’ll kill him.

But it wasn’t going to come to that because she couldn’t really believe Harry wasn’t alive.

Because if he was dead it was her fault.

Emil Draga sat rigidly upright, his shoulders wedged in the corner between seat and window, and Anders wrestled drunkenly with the wheel, driving poorly, failing to anticipate rocks and potholes in the trail; Carole clung one-handed to the armrest.

They rolled onto a flat shelf of rock and Anders pointed vaguely to the right. “That trail’s a phony. We wasted two hours on it yesterday.” He swung left into the bed of a stream and the four-wheel-drive whined high. He was hunched forward, using the wheel for support; he was past the end of his endurance and she steeled herself against pity.

“How much farther?”

“Maybe an hour, hour and a half.”

“Describe the camp again for me.”

“What can you possibly accomplish except to get our stupid heads blown off?”

“Tell me about the camp. Do it now.”

The trail grew steeper and narrower. They had to use the winch. Somewhere in the run of the next hour the rain stopped but she didn’t notice, partly because her mind was elsewhere and partly because the trees kept dripping long after it quit raining. When the sun shot a ray through a hole overhead she said, “Where are we now?”

“Not too—” Then the truck ran into something and came to a dead stop, pitching her against the dash. The revolver clattered to the floor and she felt around for it while Anders stared at her stupidly. The engine had gone dead and he was twisting the key but nothing happened: The starter didn’t grind, nothing happened at all.

She found the revolver. “What is it?”

“How do I know? It’s gone dead.”

“Well get out and look under the hood!”

“I’m no mechanic, lady.” But he got out anyway and lifted the hood. He looked in from one side and then went around to the other side and looked there.

She got out of the car. “What is it?”

“Maybe a wire got knocked loose somewhere.”

“Find it. Fix it.”

“I’m looking, damn it.” He reached in tentatively, touched something and jerked back with a little cry.

“Did you find it?”

“No. It’s hot, that’s all.”

“Oh for God’s sake.” She peered in under the hood, as if that would do any good, and after a moment closed her eyes and forced herself to fend off this added frustration and get a grip on her composure. All right, the son of a bitch truck had broken down, it wasn’t that important, they weren’t far from their destination anyway — she went back to the door and reached in and wrenched the blindfold off Emil Draga’s head.

Draga winced and squinted in the unfamiliar light, cowering as if he expected a bullet.

Anders said, “What the hell are you doing now?”

Ignoring him she stood back and waggled the revolver at Draga. “Come on. Out.”

Draga backed out slowly, reaching for the earth with one tentative foot, presenting his big rump to the gun.

Anders said, “Put the blindfold back on him. He’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”

“He’ll break his neck up there if he can’t see where he’s going.”

“I figure to break his neck anyway,” Anders said with emotionless gravity. He seemed too drained to hold onto the trappings of hate; only the core remained.

“Maybe you’ll get a crack at him later. Right now I need him.”

“For what?”

“To get Harry out.”

“You’re out of your mind. They won’t go for that.”

“You know who this is? You know who his grandfather is? They need this big shit alive.” She had no energy for argument; she looked up into the dank jungle. “How do I get there? Follow these ruts?”

“There aren’t any more phony trails that I remember. Yeah, we just follow the ruts. A couple-three miles, I guess.”

“It’s not ‘we’ — I want you to stay with the truck and get it fixed and wait for us.”

A residue of pride straightened Anders and he began to protest but she cut him off. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, Glenn. You’d be of no help to me and you’d probably give us away too early.”

“You can’t go up there by yourself for Christ’s sake.”

“Well I’ve got El Creepo for company, haven’t I?”

“What is it, lady — some romantic urge to die with your lover? Is that what you want?”

Frogs chirruped and there was a racket of birds; water gurgled somewhere. She watched Anders lean forward, propped against both stiff arms, his palms on the fender of the Bronco, legs splayed, too weak to stand without support, tremors in his knees, head sagging, squeezing his eyes shut, shaking his head to clear it of dizziness. She wondered if the swollen eye was infected. She turned away from him and peered into the dense towering tangle. “If we’re not back by morning you may as well call in the police.”

He gave no sign he’d heard her. She said, “Glenn?”

“What?”

“Don’t pass out. We’ll need this thing running — we can’t get away without it.”

“I told you, I’m no mechanic. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.”

She checked her pockets: penknife, half a box of cartridges for the revolver, handkerchief, the disposable butane cigarette lighter Harry had told her to carry. The coarse denim of the jeans scraped her thighs when she turned toward Emil Draga. His lofty eyes were narrowed to slits against the light and there was no fathoming his expression.

Anders said, “What’s the point of getting yourself killed? It won’t help Harry. He’s dead anyway. He’s seen their faces — there’s no way they can afford to turn him loose.”

“Is that how you’d have felt if it was Rosalia up there?”

“Rosalia.” His lips formed themselves clumsily around the word. He pushed himself upright and turned his head balefully toward Emil Draga.

“Glenn, I’m counting on you to have this running when we get back.” She wigwagged Emil Draga toward the trail and he began to trudge uphill. She didn’t miss the glint of cunning in his eyes as he went past her. She turned back once more. “Get this truck fixed — that’s all you need to think about.”

Anders’ bleak eye blinked at her; the other eye was swollen shut now. Too wilted to resist the force of her will, he only said, “Look out for tripwires and things. And they’ll have guards posted when you get up toward those high ridges. Stay out of the road when you get up there.”

She was already walking away.

The humid forest dragged at her feet, slowing her pace. It was all uphill and her legs wobbled from the strain. Emil Draga walked ahead of her in stony silence.

After half an hour she called a halt and sat down with her knees drawn up and the revolver propped on him. Emil slid down on his haunches, ever watchful.

“I expect your grandfather has some kind of affection for you,” Carole said. “I loved my son a great deal, you know, even though most of the time I had a strange way of showing it.”

“If it pleases you to talk,” Draga said, “talk.”

“Listen to me now. I want to save the life that still matters to me. You’re the only weapon I have.”

Draga watched her; he didn’t speak.

“Maybe I’m just tired,” she said, “but it’s come to me that it’s no good sacrificing the living to avenge the dead.”

He did not stir.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that I’m not going to shoot you with this unless you force me to do it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You’re a fool.” He showed his contempt by tipping his head back against the tree and shutting his eyes.

“I got Harry Crobey into this,” she said doggedly, “and now I want to get him out of it. That’s what I want — it’s all I want. I don’t give a shit about you and your misbegotten counterrevolution. Do you understand me?”

No reply. Carole lifted herself on watery knees. “Get up.”

There was a tripwire and she told him to walk around through the forest to avoid it. She walked directly behind him with the gun near Draga’s spine because she didn’t want anyone taking her by surprise from the shadows. The sodden ground sucked at her boots. A gust of wind came along like a breath from an oven. She felt the overpowering burden of her guilt and forced herself to disregard it; she imposed calm upon herself and narrowed her thinking down to a slit through which only the most immediate practical concerns could pass.

She felt a tendon go, in her heel, and kept moving; she fastened her lips against the twinges.

Allegro and pianissimo now. Forget the pain in the goddamned foot. It can’t be far now.

The trees were heavy, vines thickly entwined. Orchids and lush verdure; insects about her face. A dank smell of primeval rot.

She remembered bits of Harry’s dicta. Never talk to the enemy until you’ve licked him. Well there was a time to break every rule. She worked out what had to happen and rehearsed her lines until the repetition assumed the tiresome ritual predictability of a flamenco or kabuki episode:

Send Harry out here. Send him out or I kill your precious Draga. Don’t follow us. We’ll turn Draga loose when we know we’re safe.

It was all she’d need to say to them. All the decisions that were hers to make had been made now. The final decision would be up to Rodriguez. She had nothing more to do but play it out to the end.

It probably would go against her; most likely she’d end up killed, dead in the festering jungle and no one to mourn. But she would go through with this because it was Harry. And because she had got the poor son of a bitch into this mess. And because I have got, you should pardon the expression, integrity.

She moved with extreme caution now, the revolver cocked and leveled upon Draga’s spine from inches away.

It was, she thought, suicidally and hysterically pointless. But she had to do it for Harry. And for herself.

Another tripwire; they went around its anchor; she said, “Stay in the trees now. Don’t go in the road.”

This was high ground. The primitive track skirted a jutting rock and bent out of sight, tipping down to disappear. From within, the edge of the trees she surveyed it and saw no way to cross that point without stepping into the roadway. She chewed her lip. “Well go over that rock — over the back side of it.”

“I can’t climb that rock with my hands behind my back.”

It was true. But she wasn’t going to take the handcuffs off him. Gun or no gun. He could throw a rock at her, run for it, anyway. She couldn’t afford to lose him now.

“All right. Then we’ll use the road. My gun in your back all the way — if anything happens you’re the first to die. This thing is cocked. Keep it in mind.”

She had no idea at all what might be in his head; he gave nothing away. His facade of indifference troubled her because it might mean that with Latin soldierlike machismo he was prepared to die for the sake of his comrades. She rather doubted it because he was too much the child of privilege for that sort of down-in-flames gesture, but it was a possibility and if it came true then she’d have lost.

She said, “Move.”

“Be careful with that thing, woman. You could trip and set it off.”

“That would be a crying shame,” she snapped. “Move.”

He stepped out into the road and she followed. Draga moved forward a pace at a time, head lifted, apparently scanning the treetops and rocks above them. She crowded close behind him with the revolver all but touching his back. She found herself waiting for the bullet that would kill her: She wondered what it would sound like.

Without warning Draga wheeled. His elbow whacked the revolver aside. Instinctively she clenched her hand — the revolver slammed her palm in recoil; the noise was earsplitting; the bullet went harmlessly off the road somewhere; and Draga was swinging his heavy boot against her — a clumsy kick, off-balance, but it pummeled her off her feet and she sprawled. She didn’t lose her grip on the gun but she was still trying to roll over and face him when something — it must have been his boot — thundered against her kidney and propelled her over the edge of the road’s shelf and then she was tumbling, rolling, falling down the slick mud of a nearly perpendicular mountainside — brush whipped at her, clawed her face; rocks rattled under her; she was falling in space, then sliding in muck — the world spinning.

Things went nearly black but she heard the bellowing of Emil Draga’s voice somewhere far above her and she peered through the haze of her vision — brush and trees loomed at crazy angles. She heard the rush of water.

She’d lost the revolver, of course. A kind of equilibrium returned to her, she got her bearings and distinguished up from down. Above her was the track of her own sliding fall — she was incredulous at the length of the scar her body had sluiced in the mud: She must have fallen nearly a hundred feet and she wondered how many of her bones were shattered. It was a clinical thought, detached. She lay motionless, blinking. Pain gradually flooded through her system; everything ached.

At the top she didn’t see anything move at the rim of the road. It occurred to her that Emil’s voice was fading. He was still yelling but it was farther away. He must be running toward the camp, yelling for help.

In a little while, she thought, they’d come back and finish her.

She wondered if she could move.

She lifted her head away from whatever had cushioned it. Well at least the head and neck worked. She looked down the length of her body.

The jeans were ripped, a long slice along the left calf. There was no open cut but the skin was abraded and dappled with angry red dots.

She lifted her left hand experimentally and winced at the sudden pain in it, but she closed it into a fist and opened it and continued to stare whimsically at it. There was a nasty raw blot across the back of it where she must have flailed against something. But the fingers functioned.

Now the right hand. It was pinned half under her and she had to roll her torso back to free it. Every movement inflicted a new throbbing ache.

But nothing refused to articulate.

She had fallen into a scrub of some kind: more bush than tree. She’d crushed half of it but the rest of it supported her, a sort of latticed mattress of twig and leaves. The pitch of the slope began to level off here. It tilted down more gently — another twenty or thirty yards perhaps; trees at the bottom and she couldn’t see beyond them.

If she’d come off the rim twenty feet to either side she’d have dropped into boulders. If it hadn’t been raining incessantly the slope wouldn’t have eased her fall. If... By blind luck she was alive.

Silence now, only the rattle of flowing water below in the trees. She didn’t hear Emil Draga any longer. Raindrops began to drip on her.

With a rough uncaring need to know, she curled her feet under her and attempted to stand up.

The bush collapsed under her. Clinging to it she fell another ten feet and slid to a painful halt, both hands splayed to ward off obstacles. Her palms, now, began to bleed.

She trembled with a pounding violence that she found almost comical: She grunted with effort and stubbornly climbed to her feet and lurched downhill until she blundered up against the slimy trunk of a big tree; she stood against it numbly, waggling her toes inside her boots, moving her arms about, sucking a great breath into her chest.

Everything hurt, everything throbbed, but unaccountably the organism appeared to be in rudimentary working order.

She rubbed both abraded palms against the cloth of her blouse, smearing blood and mud together. Christ. Somehow she was alive.

Then she heard them — a faint clanking; voices. Coming along the high shelf of the road above her. She recognized Emil Draga’s bellowing anger.

It wasn’t thought; it was primitive impulse that drove her back into the protective darkness of the jungle.

Her breasts felt as if they’d been squashed under a tractor and her hands stung so badly she could hardly stir them, and one knee had gone wonky — a ligament or something; it hurt every time she put her weight on it at a certain angle. There was a frightful bruise along her right hip, her left calf was sharp agony where it had been scraped raw and both shoulder blades felt as if they’d had chips axed out of them. She had welts on cheek and forehead; her scalp hurt frightfully where a lock of hair had caught in something and been ripped away; she had a thin bleeding line in her lower lip, like a paper cut — she kept licking it — and her teeth felt as if they’d been jarred loose. Both elbows gave her trouble and she found a new pain in her shoulder when she tried to lift her right arm to ward off a branch she ducked under.

She went slowly downhill through the stinking growth; steam eddied about her. The tattered rags of her outfit clung to her like shreds of flesh on a rotting corpse. She found the water almost immediately — the source of the sound she’d heard: a stream, birling off rocks and swirling through a big pond and disappearing through a narrow gap beyond. The noise she’d heard was a small waterfall beyond that gap.

The rush of the waterfall made it impossible for her to hear anything from above. She didn’t know if they were following her track down the cliff. Most likely they’d have to use ropes to get down there — or go around, if they knew another path. Were they coming after her?

I would, she reasoned. They couldn’t take anything for granted. They’d need to see for themselves that she was dead. They’d come down here and look for the body.

They’d follow her tracks.

The sudden realization shot hopelessness through her. She couldn’t get away. It was only a matter of time — a few minutes at best.

No way to outrun them. The shape she was in, she could barely hobble.

She sat down gingerly.

“I’m sorry, Harry. I gave it my best shot.”

She whispered the words and her eyes rolled shut.

Harry...

The thought stunned her awake.

“God damn it — I am not dead yet!”

Cunning, now. She needed every whit of cleverness. She knelt by the pond and scooped water in her hands, rubbed her palms together gently in the water to wash off the clots of mud and blood, cupped handfuls of water and splashed it in her face. It was shockingly cold.

They can’t follow tracks in water.

The pond was mostly bordered by the exposed roots of trees where the soil had been washed away. She gripped the roots and lowered herself slowly into the water, at first stunned by the icy chill, then welcoming it because it began to anesthetize her throbbing aches.

Take your time now. It wouldn’t do to get swept out into the current and carried over the waterfall. She moved along with slow deliberation, clinging to out-jutting roots, moving from one handhold to the next.

They’d expect her to go downstream — downhill — toward the bottom of the mountains and escape.

She went uphill instead. Pulling herself against the current. Up to the head of the pond where the water foamed over rocks in the shallow streambed. Then she trudged carefully upstream, cautiously placing one foot at a time and testing for solidity.

The stream came burbling down out of a narrow chasm. She climbed doggedly into it, moving from stone to stone, bracing herself with one hand against the wall of the chasm. The water was only a foot deep most places; sometimes she was able to walk on the tops of stepping-stones.

One of them rocked and gave way, overturning. She windmilled her arms crazily and went in up to the knees, thinking in panic that she’d twisted her ankle.

That would be the last sonofabitching straw. She put her weight on it angrily and it was all right and she realized then that there weren’t any last straws — she had come too far for that; nothing was going to stop her short of death.

It started to rain again. Pelting down. Drops so big they hurt when they struck her exposed bruises. You can’t get any wetter than wet, she told herself dismally, and continued stubbornly up the chasm, the water rising to her thighs once and almost pitching her over.

Exhaustion dragged her to a stop and she stood with both palms against the rock face, panting. She looked back down toward the pond but there wasn’t anything to see in the sheeting rain.

Soon, she knew, they would begin searching up this way. She had to get out of the chasm. They are the ones who killed Robert and they’ll damn sure kill me, too, if I let them.

She wasn’t going to let them. Because she still had Harry to think about and she didn’t intend to let him down. Cool dispassion now: This was the time to move fast, get out into the jungle and lose herself in it, because the battering rain would cover her tracks and this squall wasn’t likely to last much longer.

The walls of the chasm fell away above her. She saw a narrow waterfall at the top but it looked as if there might be a way to climb out to one side of it, if the rain hadn’t made the rock too slick. Trees loomed up there; vines and roots dangled thick. There was a rainbow at the top. She grinned at it: It was too Hollywood to be true. She climbed toward it but the sun moved, or the clouds did, and the rainbow disappeared.

As she approached the top she moved through tendrils of mist and realized she was actually inside the cloud. She groped for handholds, tested her weight on corkscrew roots, drew herself up six inches at a time, tearing her sodden clothes on things, planting new bruises on top of the old ones, ignoring all of it.

When she looked over her shoulder she couldn’t see the pond anymore; it was screened by the trees and the curve of the chasm and the rain. She faced upward again. Not far now. They’ll expect me to run for it. They won’t expect me to come for Harry.

Chapter 20

The distributor cap had popped its clips and one of the main battery leads had slipped off its lug; that was the extent of the damage that Anders could see but he didn’t know much about automobile engines and he had little confidence in his repairs until he turned the key and it actually started up.

Then he sat at the wheel engaged in sluggish debate with himself. He could do one of three things. He could follow Carole up the road — they’d been gone only an hour or so and he still might catch up before they reached the camp. Or he could do as she’d asked — remain here and wait for them. If they showed up. Or he could turn the damn thing around and do the sensible sane thing: Head for the nearest telephone and call the cops.

There wasn’t much point in this first option. By the time he got up there with the Bronco they’d be in the thick of it and there wasn’t much assistance he could render; he was unarmed and woozy with infection and his eyesight was going every which way. And as for the second option, it would be a few more hours at least before anything could happen here — even if by some miracle she got Crobey out alive it would take them that long to make their way back to this point. By then Anders could make it to a phone, summon help, and return to meet them. Get the cops in there: Try to rescue Crobey and Carole, and wipe out the nest of Cuban bastards who’d murdered Rosalia. There was more than enough of a case now. The murder of Rosalia and the cache of heavy weapons up there — not even old man Draga’s influence could persuade the Puerto Rican cops to ignore that.

There were some bad dangers in this last possibility though — suppose Carole showed up in fifteen minutes’ time, having changed her mind or having been chased by one of Rodriguez’s scouts? Suppose she ran this far seeking sanctuary and found Anders and the Bronco gone?

In the end he decided that he might as well play it for keeps. By the time help came the outcome would be decided anyway, and he couldn’t risk abandoning Crobey and Carole. He wasn’t that far gone.

They’d been scouring the jungle foot by foot but now some unspoken logic brought everybody together at once, by the bank of the pond. Council of war.

Julio said, “Maybe she fell in the water and got swept over the waterfall.”

Cielo said, “Anything is possible.”

Julio was looking at Cielo, pinning him with his gaze. “We can’t let her get away, you know.”

“Then find her,” Cielo snapped. “What do you expect me to do about it, Julio?”

“If she gets away she’ll tell everything.” Julio wheeled toward two men coming in from the jungle. “Santos — Badillo — take one of the Jeeps, take a run down the trail, see if you can find this Anders with the stalled car. Where Emil says they left him.”

Cielo said, “Bring him alive. We must find out how much he knows. He shouldn’t give you trouble — Emil says he’s sick and he hasn’t got any weapons. Santos, I know you. If you kill him I’ll be very angry with you.”

The two men slung their Uzzis and batted away obediently through the trees.

Julio was waving his arms. “The rest of you search the stream, both banks. If she came out she left tracks. If she didn’t you’ll find her body in the water.”

Cielo was bouncing the revolver in his fist. It was the woman’s revolver. He’d found it back up the slope. Suddenly he laughed. “She’s alone, she hasn’t got a weapon, she must be hurt pretty bad — look what we’ve come to, Julio.”

The others were fanning out along the bank. Julio glared at him. “You want her to get down to the valley and tell everybody where we are, Cielo? Is that what you want?”

Men moved through the trees, as insubstantial as fog. Cielo felt the tension inside him. His chest was lifting and falling. He cleared his throat and dragged a sleeve across his forehead. “I’m going back to the camp.”

“You ought to help us find her.”

“They’ll find her or they won’t. I’m too tired to play these stupid Boy Scout games. Cristo — this whole stupidity is Emil’s fault. Killing the Lundquist boy, killing the CIA woman. These calamitous delusions. All he wants is killing. Now we must pay for Emil’s sins.”

“It’s not finished.” Julio stayed him with a hand on his sleeve. “Listen to me. We’ll find the woman and we’ll bring Anders up here and find out if he’s told anybody else. Listen, the killing’s hardly started, you’d better recognize that. Anders, the woman — and Crobey’s seen all our faces. We can’t turn him loose, can we.”

“Ah, man, who cares about that anymore? Nobody wants to kill Harry. Nobody except Emil. We’ll pull out, Julio, we’ll leave this place, that’s all. We’ve been here too long anyway.”

“They can identify us!”

“So? What of it? We can steal a boat. They won’t find us in Venezuela or Brazil.”

“And the weapons? Just leave them here? After everything?”

“Julio, the guns will never reach Havana anyway. Forget it. It was a bad dream. The old man’s hallucination, that’s all.”

“You never wanted anything out of this except the money, did you?”

“I’m a realist. It’s all I’ve ever expected to come of this.” Cielo looked around. All the men had disappeared but now he saw two of them making their way back upstream along the far bank: They must have clambered down past the waterfall and crossed the stream on the rocks below. They went along with their noses to the ground, seeking tracks.

Julio said, “I’m a realist, too, you know. I recognize we could never bring it off by ourselves, not this handful of us. But we’ve got the weapons now, the money. With those we have power. There will always be people to fight the Communists — from San Juan to Santo Domingo. We can be a nucleus — barter our services throughout the Caribbean.”

“You’re dreaming, Julio, my ears are deaf to it. You remind me of Emil. Well let me tell you — I don’t want to be a general in your crusade. I want to go out in my new boat and catch fish, that’s all. You and Emil can fight it out between you.”

The man across the pond stood on the bank and lifted both arms wide with an expressive shrug of his shoulders, signifying that he’d found nothing. Julio acknowledged it by pointing up toward the head of the pond. “Keep looking,” he shouted.

Cielo turned away from the pond. “Better get back to camp. Maybe she’s out there dying in the jungle somewhere but we can’t take the chance. Let’s get things packed up. We’ll have to evacuate.”

Julio came along after him, puffing with the circuitous climb. Off to the right Cielo could see the toboggan slide trough of the woman’s fall. He marveled that she could have walked away from that. It was the mud, he thought, this damnable muck.

He felt sorrow for the woman. Crobey’s woman. Well, he felt sorrow for them both. The woman would get lost out there and the jungle would kill her. If she hadn’t drowned already.

“Let’s hurry. I don’t trust Emil up there with Crobey.”

“Vargas will keep them separated,” Julio said.

“Emil would slit Vargas’ throat if it seemed useful.” Cielo scrambled over the lip onto the road and hurried toward the camp.

Through the trees he had a glimpse of the mouth of the cave above the camp. How ludicrous, he thought. All that ordnance — the heavy weapons, the vehicles, the tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. All that and they couldn’t even wage effective war against Crobey’s unarmed woman. Oh, we’re the terrors of the Caribbean, all right.

She crawled wincing to the edge of the high trees and looked out, panting in the thick steamy air. The rain was letting up. Pains stabbed through her and she had to wait for her vision to clear.

The flat was open to her left. Farther along the cliff she saw a fresh scar, white jagged bits of rock like exposed bone and a couple of poles that looked as if they’d fallen down. A length of cable lay curled sinuously, its end frayed like Medusan hair, and not far from her squatted a little gasoline engine with a winch drum. Someone had spent some time beside it because there were half a dozen empty beer bottles and soda pop cans.

She lay with her chin on the back of her hand, soaked through, hair matted, tattered as a barrio urchin. She was studying the camp below the cliff. Four or five rudimentary huts — thatched conical roofs, African-style. Two Jeeps were parked haphazardly between the two largest huts. While she watched, she saw two men come up into the camp from the path beyond. She didn’t recognize them, though she could see neither of them was Emil Draga. They both wore green combat fatigues and military caps and she wondered if they were aware of the irony of that: Castro and his men wore the same uniforms.

The two men went past the Jeeps calling out ahead of them. In response a man appeared in the door of the largest hut: a huge man, too bulky to be Emil Draga. There was a brief exchange of words down there; then the two men went inside the hut and the huge man crossed the campground to another hut, went inside briefly and then emerged, backing out, his submachine gun leveled. Another man followed him out and, obeying the gestures of the huge man, walked around ahead of him toward the big hut. The prisoner limped a bit. She saw nothing but the back of him but it was Harry all right, and her heart soared.

Emil was pacing back and forth, rubbing the cloth bandages they’d wrapped around his wrists after Vargas had sawed off the manacles. Julio was rummaging in his duffel bag under one of the cots, looking for dry clothes to change into. Cielo stood near the door and watched while Harry Crobey stooped to enter the hut, followed by Vargas who went straight across to the radio and sat down with the Kalashnikov across his knees to fiddle with the tuner knob. The radio sputtered and hissed but there was nothing on that band. Harry Crobey looked from face to face with sardonic amusement. When no one spoke to him he sat down at the camp table and began to play solitaire.

Vargas looked up. “Emil wanted to kill him so I kept them separated.”

Crobey glanced at Emil. “I invited him to try with his bare hands, since Vargas wouldn’t give him a weapon, but he’s a chicken-shit bastard.” He leered. Emil was a head taller and forty pounds heavier than Crobey, and could spot him nearly thirty years, but Emil wasn’t a fool. Not in that way. Crobey knew a hundred ways to kill a man bare-handed.

Emil declined to rise to Crobey’s bait. He only said to Cielo, in an offhand way, “He knows our faces and of course he must be killed.”

Cielo said, “That might be futile. There are others. We can’t kill every last one of them. To you, Emil, the answer to every question is a bullet, isn’t it. The fact is it probably won’t matter to our security whether Harry goes free or not.”

He saw Crobey’s eyes flash but Crobey was too wise to ask questions.

“Then again,” Julio said, “she may be dead in the jungle. That was a hell of a fall she took when you kicked her over the cliff.”

Cielo addressed Crobey: “Who else have you and Anders told about this?”

“I can’t speak for Anders. He’s probably telling the whole world about it by now. Me, I only told three or four friends.” Crobey grinned at him. “You’re right. Maybe I’m worth something to you alive, as a hostage, but it won’t do you any good to waste me.”

Julio said, “Of course he’d say that anyway, whether it’s true or not.”

“It’s more likely true than not true,” Cielo said. “When the others return we’ll pack our personal belongings and take enough small arms to defend ourselves — in case. We’ll go down the back side of El Yunque and fade into the country to the south.”

Emil was looking at Vargas’ Kalashnikov, possibly gauging his chances. Cielo said, “Emil, we’re not taking you with us. You’ll have to make your own way.”

“I always knew you were a traitor.” Emil said it without heat and without looking at him; he was still facing Vargas, who returned his gaze evenly, with bovine indifference. Vargas had a thick skin and a gentle soul but Emil knew better than to attack him head-on.

Emil said, “You people have bungled everything, right from the start. You’ve been humoring my grandfather, isn’t that it? You’ve never had any intention of carrying through with his wishes.”

“Neither have you,” Cielo replied. “Your grandfather’s dream is a free Cuba. Your dream is a dictatorship — your own.”

Julio said, “We’re going to have to kill Emil, too, aren’t we.”

It made Cielo look at him. Julio’s eyes were sad. “You were right, you know. Once the killing starts it never stops. Emil’s the one who started it. It can only stop when he’s dead.”

Emil swiveled — now he was facing not only Vargas’ but Julio’s as well.

Crobey slapped one card down on top of another. He said, “If all you blokes kill each other I can just walk out of here. Right? It’s a splendid idea, chaps. Go to it.”

Emil looked about him with disdain. “Kill me and my grandfather will avenge it. Your women, Cielo, your children. My grandfather will have them killed, and you and your brother and all your men — no matter how far you go, no matter where you try to hide.”

Julio said, “Not if you die in an accident witnessed only by me and my brother. And Vargas here.”

“And Crobey,” said Crobey. “Don’t forget old Harry.”

“Christ, Harry,” Cielo said, “your presence gives me a ripe pain in the ass right now. What are we going to do with you?”

“I don’t know, old sport. But I don’t see as you’ve got anything to gain by killing me.”

“For the love of God,” Cielo murmured haplessly, “I don’t want to kill anybody.”

The man who’d gone to search upstream came running urgently back to the pond and stood above the waterfall summoning the others with shrill whistles. When two men came in sight downstream in the drizzle he waved his arms violently and the two men shouted back into the jungle.

By ones and twos the others appeared below the waterfall and the first two men waited impatiently while they climbed up to him. Then he led them upstream, excited, to show them what he’d found — freshly overturned stones in the stream. Someone had gone up through the chasm to the rimrock above.

“It must be the woman. Come on — we will look on top for her tracks.”

Confused as to his bearings, Anders fought to stay awake. Fever drenched him in sweat and something was going wonky with the one good eye he had left. He slammed down into a lower gear and fought the wheel. The primitive roadway had all but petered out by now. He’d have to get out and walk soon.

He clenched his stomach muscles to fight back dizziness and shoved the Bronco forward in an effort to pick up speed while he could still drive at all. Rosalia was gone but he had the illusory vague sense he could redeem himself by accomplishing this mission; at least he had to give it his best shot. But then his eye clouded over and he dragged his sleeve across it. He was having trouble co-ordinating his body and hit the accelerator by mistake. He was going about fifteen miles an hour up the gravel when he went off into a culvert. The Bronco slowly tipped over and fell on its side. Glenn Anders was knocked out, and he would remain that way when the guerrillas came to drag him back to the camp.

Listless stupidity was wearing off; she was thinking more clearly now and her nerves started to jangle — the terror that had muted itself expanded inside her now and she trembled uncontrollably. All the aches and stings of her injuries grew acute; she noticed new agonies she hadn’t felt before.

This was madness. There was nothing she could do — nothing but make a fool of herself and get killed. Christ, the best combat soldier in the world would know enough to get the hell out of here. She was beginning to remember a lot of Harry’s dicta — among them that a soldier’s first job was to keep alive: He’d quoted Patton’s line about not dying for your country but making the other bastard die for his country.

All the same she was working, moving, preparing for the attack. The soda pop bottles, mud and gravel from the ground, gasoline from the tank of the donkey engine, her shirttails for fuses. She had three of them in one hand, the bottlenecks clutched in her fingers like a busboy carrying Cokes, and she was making her way down the switchbacking footpath — terrified because if anybody stepped outside the hut they’d see her on the face of the cliff above them. There was no place to hide. They could pin her to this wall like an insect On a display board.

Chilly dispassion had deserted her; it must have been the effects of the shock. She felt debilitated with terror now and she kept thinking of all the things that could go wrong. She made her way down the steep path one step at a time, testing the footing with a shaking foot, sliding one shoulder along the wall, terrified of toppling over the narrow shelf — it was a sheer drop. The arms cave that Anders had described must be over to her left somewhere but there were outcroppings of rock and she couldn’t see it. Still, she needed to keep that in mind. If the arms were unguarded... But they wouldn’t be that silly, would they? No. It meant there’d be someone in the cave, and she had to remember that because it meant she’d have someone behind her when she approached the camp.

Come on now. One step at a time and don’t think about anything else until you get to the bottom.

The man in the cave sat with a bottle of beer and his memories of a Norwegian girl in a fly-specked room in Guatemala. He was half asleep and didn’t want anybody to catch him dozing so he got up and walked around the cave. The rain had let up but a kind of mist hung in the air, cloud tendrils prying into the cave and he felt clammy.

He stopped beside a bipod-mounted mortar and rested his hand on its uptilted muzzle. Such a primitive device, the mortar, yet devastatingly effective: An open steel pipe with a firing pin at the bottom of it, that was all it amounted to. He liked that sort of simplicity. Complicated mechanisms disturbed him; he distrusted them.

He walked across the mouth of the cave and stopped suddenly. Was that a movement over to the right at the base of the cliff — someone slipping into the trees?

He looked away, looked again: But the movement didn’t recur. After a moment he lifted his rifle and sat down to watch that quadrant, alert now, ready to kill.

Coming over the rimrock the half-dozen men deployed through the trees seeking tracks; there was a shout from up ahead and it drew them all onto the rim by the donkey engine. Here they studied and discussed the evidence they saw in the earth. There were fresh tracks, made since the downpour. The tracks were hard to make out, since everything was imprecise in the squishy clay, but it was evident someone had spent a bit of time here, rummaging about.

The area beyond the donkey engine was slab rock; it didn’t hold tracks. The men fanned out, a few into the jungle, two more going forward along the rim. One man began to descend the narrow switch-backing footpath that led to the camp at the bottom of the cliff.

She could see him coming down the cliff and she could see the angular one who squatted just inside the mouth of the big cave with a rifle in both hands; she saw them from her hiding place back in the sodden trees and she wondered if she had left tracks that the one on the path would find when he got to the bottom.

She saw two more men up top, fitful glimpses of them as they made their way along the rim above the cave. And there’d been voices — even more of them above her somewhere.

Madness, she thought. Sheer utter madness: I belong in a rubber room. Stupid lunacy. But then if you figure to get killed anyway what’s the point of beating around the bush?

She felt momentarily proud of herself for that thought because it sounded like something of Harry’s.

She went dizzy for a moment but she didn’t faint; she only stumbled a bit and reached for a tree trunk for support. Its surface was slimy and repulsive to her touch. She took the disposable plastic cigarette lighter out of her pocket. Harry: I don’t care if you don’t smoke. It’s a survival weapon: Always carry fire with you.

The rags she’d torn from her blouse and stuffed into the necks of the bottles were soaked with rain and she didn’t know whether that would destroy their capillary ability to soak up gasoline from the bottles. She’d wrung them out as dry as she could but what if they refused to catch fire? In this weather it was possible to imagine that nothing would burn.

She put the lighter back in her pocket. It wasn’t time for it yet. Then she gingerly shifted two of the bottles to her left hand, winced when she scraped a raw wound, and crept to the next tree. Her boots sank ankle-deep into the mud. She was in the jungle now and she couldn’t see out past the dark thickness of trees and bamboo and lush creeping things; that man on the cliff must be halfway to the bottom by now and she didn’t have much time at all.

Madness, she thought again.

And moved toward the huts.

See, ducks, the thing is, guerrilla warfare’s got nothing to do with the kind of thing they teach at Sandhurst and West Point. That’s what the American Army never learned in Nam. You want to stay alive, you learn to think like a magician — the kind you see doing tricks with scarves and coins and cards in cheap dives in Brighton and Sausalito. You wave the right hand around to get everybody’s attention and in the meantime behind your back your left hand’s pulling the pin on the grenade and they don’t even see it when you roll it under their table. Simple misdirection — diversion’s the whole thing, you get their attention by making a big noise to the right and then you sneak up on ’em from the left.

All she could do, really, was provide Harry with his diversion.

She’d made it as far as the first Jeep and she was crouched beside it peering up through the mud-stained windshield: Four or five men were coalescing at the top of the cliff and starting down the narrow shelving path; the man who’d started earlier was down out of sight now but when she turned her head she could still see the man in the cave, standing up now, watching the jungle, rifle held ready across his chest.

She dropped a bit lower and looked across the seats toward the big hut. She’d seen Harry go inside that one; she had to assume he was still in there, even though she’d been out of sight of it.

She set the three bottles on the muddy clay by her feet and dug the plastic lighter out of her pocket.

Crobey was playing the ten of clubs on the jack of hearts when concussion from the blast knocked him off his chair and drove the woven-bamboo door into the room like a projectile. It caromed against the table, knocking it down across him and spilling cards all over him.

The deafening racket echoed inside the hut and he had quickly-glimpsed impressions of everybody in action — Vargas peeling himself off the radio and groping for his Kalashnikov; Emil ducking, arms over his head, then straightening and searching wildly for a weapon; Julio Rodriguez wheeling toward the door lifting his Uzzi; Cielo scowling in that baffled I-knew-it way of his, lifting the revolver in his hand as if he considered it a futile gesture demanded by protocol.

Crobey’s ears were still ringing when his mind focused on one object and he rolled toward it — the knapsack they’d taken off him when they’d captured him. It lay open beyond the radio, its contents exposed. Vargas was tramping toward the doorway through which the explosion had burst; flames were climbing both sides of the doorframe now, erupting very fast, and the Cubans began to shoot — spraying ammunition blindly through the fire and smoke. Emil was yelling at the top of his voice and for a moment none of them was looking at Crobey and he pounced on the knapsack. He did all the rest of it in a continuous fluid motion: Plucked a gas grenade from the open bag, jerked the pin out, slid it across the floor toward the Cubans, got his good leg under him, and launched himself back into the shadows behind the bulk of the radio. There was a back door in that dark wall — you never built a military hut without a back way out — but it was bolted on the inside and he wasted precious time trying to find the bolt in the bad light. Gas exploded through the room and he began to choke on it, tears streaming, but then he had the damned thing open and he plunged outside, fell three feet into the mud and rolled fast.

He heard them coughing in there and then the second explosion knocked him about and something stung his cheek, laying it open — he felt the sudden warmth of spouting blood before the pain hit. A great blaze of fire erupted at the far corner of the hut and Crobey scrambled to his feet and wheeled to run for it. Then he heard Carole:

“Harry. Over here!”

He heard himself mutter: “Good grief.” Then he was running toward the Jeep, bent over, weaving from side to side. Bullets were still flying through the flames from inside the hut but that dwindled fast — the gas would be disabling all of them now but then the shooting picked up again and he realized it was coming from elsewhere. A string of bullets from an automatic weapon sewed a swift stitch along the mud in front of him, little geysers spouting, and he threw himself flat, skidding in the muck, sliding behind the Jeep and aware that there were men on the cliff shooting down through the flames.

She stared at him, not moving, and he took the blazing Molotov cocktail from her hand and heaved it mightily. It exploded in the air and rained shards of blazing petrol over the camp. Bits of gravel and shattered glass banged against the Jeep and he realized that was what had cut his cheek — a sliver of glass from the previous bomb. He gripped her hard, by the wrist, yanking her away. “Run for it!” And hurled her into the trees ahead of him.

She tumbled into a rotting moist pool that stank of compost; she flailed weakly in protest when Harry hauled her out of it.

His face was ghastly — a long ragged slit below the cheekbone, blood matted everywhere. But a smile came into his eyes. Feeling nearly burst her throat.

“Hello ducks.”

“Harry—”

“Come on, keep moving, keep moving.”

He propelled her through the morass. She nearly left a boot behind in it. He was half carrying her — bullying her along: “Get your goddamned ass in gear, woman.”

Smashing through twigs, stumbling against trees. He reached for a hanging vine and hauled them both up over a tangle of roots. Then the way was blocked by a stand of bamboo, its trunks as thick as drain pipes — a solid wall of it, looming into the sky. Harry pushed her to the left and she resisted. “Not that way. The cliff — we’ll be trapped.”

“Only place to go now, ducks.”

“But—”

“Shut up. Come on.” He gave her a violent heave and she lurched wildly, spinning her arms; he caught her by the elbow and then they were running, Harry gasping in her ear: “Have you got a gun or anything?”

“No...”

“It’s all right, never mind.”

She couldn’t see a thing but tree trunks and creepers; she’d lost her bearings and went helplessly whichever way Harry’s arm guided her. She ran awkwardly, her body in agony, legs protesting but Harry’s hand was like a tow rope. Vaguely she was aware of it when the shooting dwindled back there — a single ragged aftervolley, then no more guns, just voices hollering in confusion.

Then abruptly he jerked her to a stop. He tipped her against a tree. “Stay put a minute.”

“What?”

But he was leaning away from her and she stood half blind, heaving with the effort of getting air into her lungs. Her head spun and her knees had gone loose and she choked on her own saliva and began to retch. She tried to stifle it but she was drowning and she put her head down and sucked air with panic-stricken greed. Then something pummeled her between the shoulder blades — Harry, and her throat popped clear and she whooshed in a grateful breath.

“He’s gone to find out what’s happening. Come on.”

“Who?”

“Bloke from the cave.” Harry hauled her forward and in a moment they were out of the trees and the edge of the big cave was right there; Harry was saying something — “This is right where the bastards caught me. Clumsy fool, getting too old for this shit.” He pulled her into the cave and she felt him push her away toward the interior: “Get back in there out of sight. Pick something to hide behind — something that doesn’t look too much like a tombstone.”

“Harry, we’re trapped in here!”

“Go on, disappear. I’ll be right with you.”

But she stayed and when he started to wrench at the boards of a crate she helped him pry it open. He didn’t object again. He tugged with frantic haste at the Cosmoline-soaked wrappings and finally tore the oilpaper away from a stubby black weapon of some kind and thrust a magazine into it and then went around the cave peering at stenciled heiroglyphs on crates until he exclaimed, “Ha!” and kicked at the edge of a lid until it splintered; he got his fingers under it and peeled boards back on their nails and she saw the ugly serrated pineapple shapes of hand grenades. Harry began to force them into his pockets.

Then he ran to the front of the cave and peered out. She stumbled along behind him, afraid to be separated from him by more than an arm’s length.

The camp was in flames and the smoke had turned black; there wasn’t much to be seen through it. “God knows what they’re up to,” Harry grumbled. He turned then; his big hands slid around her. “You looked like the bloody cavalry, ducks. Christ, I’d given it up. Mostly they didn’t particularly want to kill me but we were getting to the point where it was the only thing they could do with me. Old Harry was dead — and then you dropped in. The last bloomin’ thing I ever—”

“Did you think,” she said softly, “I wouldn’t come for you?”

Around the perimeter of the camp the angry rifles stirred. Cielo kept wiping at his eyes and coughing in spasms; the rolling smoke didn’t help.

Emil loomed in the smoke, outlined against the burning hut; somewhere he’d found a weapon — one of the Uzzi automatic rifles. “It was the woman. A couple of Molotovs and Crobey threw tear gas — that’s all it was. I just spotted them going into the cave.”

Cielo gasped stupidly at him. He kept doubling over, coughing, and couldn’t focus on what Emil was saying.

“You’re all through,” Emil said with grating scorn. “You’re used up. I’m taking command here — you want to dispute it?” The Uzzi stirred toward Cielo.

He only coughed and rubbed at his eyes. Emil was walking away bellowing orders and he saw some of the men go trotting along after him.

They went away through the smoke and Cielo didn’t move. To hell with it all.

After a little while he heard them start shooting.

Far back in the cave they lay behind crates of rifles. Bullets crashed around, caroming, whining, smashing things up. Crobey pulled the pin from a grenade and hurled it out of the cave and she felt him drop on top of her, shielding her; the racket drove her half crazy and shrapnel pelted off the walls and ceiling. Something cracked the heel of her boot, hard. Crobey said, “Probably didn’t hit anything but at least it’ll keep them back.” Then he resumed prying at the stubborn lid of the crate beside him. By the stenciled label it contained mortar rockets.

She said, “Sooner or later the ricochets will get us or their bullets will set off something explosive in here. We haven’t got a chance, have we, Harry?”

“Might cool them off if I can get to that mortar and lob a couple into them. There aren’t but eight or ten blokes out there.”

He tossed another grenade and they ducked again and the noise seemed to explode inside her. Sudden tears rushed from her eyes and she clutched at him. “Harry, oh Harry...”

“Come on, ducks, we ain’t licked yet.” He kissed the top of her head and then he dived away, cradling two of the mortar rockets in his arms, skittering across the stone floor toward the uptilted mortar out front. Bullets began to spang around the place again but she followed him forward, yanking the pin from a grenade and throwing it with all her strength and watching it soar out of the cave before she threw herself flat and heard its devastating bellow.

Harry, she thought. Reckless indomitable Harry. She crawled behind boxes to reach him. He’d dragged the mortar back to cover and somehow hadn’t been hit but the Cubans were invisible out there in the trees and their bullets were crashing all over the cave, bouncing around like stones in a tin can, and it was only a matter of time.

“I’m scared, Harry, but I’m not sorry.”

“Right, ducks. Never apologize. Here, hold this a minute.”

Weak in all his fibers, Cielo leaned against the Jeep listening to the noise of battle. Julio came in sight, then Vargas; the two of them trudged forward batting smoke away from their faces.

Cielo said drily, “He’ll shoot both of you for desertion.”

It made Julio grunt. “Let him try.”

Something blew up — louder than a grenade this time and Cielo’s head rocked back as he tried to identify the sound. Vargas murmured, “Harry’s got one of the mortars working.”

“Christ he’ll kill all of us,” Julio complained, and glowered petulantly toward the cliff.

Cielo drew himself upright. “Let me have that.” He reached for Julio’s submachine gun.

Julio relinquished it without objection. “What are you going to do?”

“What I should have done at the very beginning. If I’d been young enough I wouldn’t have taken so long to make the decision.” He started to walk uphill, then looked back: “Wait for me here. If I don’t come back, I depend on you to look after Soledad and the girls.”

Vargas and Julio began to follow him but he waved them back. He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs while he walked between the burning huts. When he came out of the smoke he started to breathe again.

The mortar whumped again and the explosion chewed up some timber. He headed that way, assuming Crobey wasn’t shooting entirely blind.

He made his way with care the last hundred feet or so. He could tell where the men were easily enough — their guns made a steady racket for him to guide by — but he didn’t want to get nailed by one of Crobey’s mortar bursts. He heard one of them coming in, dropped flat behind a tree and felt the earth shudder when it impacted. Leaves and twigs rained on him. Then he got up and went forward again. Presently he found Emil, squatting behind a tree fitting a fresh-loaded magazine into his Uzzi.

Emil looked up and found Cielo there, and Cielo watched him for a moment, trying to think of the right words. They didn’t come to mind, and after a brief moment he simply pulled the trigger and killed Emil without fuss.

Crobey had a wicked-looking bullet burn across the back of his hand. Carole had a new bruise on top of an old one on her thigh. Pretty soon, she thought, they’d both be picked apart to splinters this way. But she handed another mortar round to him and put her hands over her ears waiting for him to drop it down the spout.

Crobey began to lift it toward the muzzle but then he paused.

The shooting had stopped. She heard somebody yelling in Spanish. Crobey slowly lowered the shell to the ground and reached for the submachine gun on the stone beside him. He was scowling, listening to the voice.

“What’s he saying?”

“I can’t make it out.”

“Harry Crobey! Hold your goddamn fire a minute. Want to talk!”

She reached for a grenade and put her finger through the pin ring. “Don’t trust the bastard, Harry.”

“Nothing to lose,” he replied. Then he let his call sing out: “Come ahead and talk!”

She saw the man emerge from the smoke dragging something heavy along the ground. The man had a weapon in his free hand but it was down at his side and not aimed anywhere in particular. He had a wild hard face, very primitive, huge cheekbones, a look of savagery.

“Is that him?” she whispered. “Rodriguez?”

“Yeah.” Crobey didn’t lift his weapon. He only watched Rodriguez struggle upslope, dragging whatever it was.

“Maybe they want to make a deal,” Crobey said sotto voce.

“Don’t listen to him, Harry.”

Rodriguez was halfway between the trees and the cave — perhaps forty feet away from them. He stopped there, out in the open. With powerful effort he lifted the object he’d been dragging. She saw it was a man — then she recognized Emil Draga. Rodriguez propped Emil Draga more or less upright, holding him in both arms, the submachine gun loose on its sling over his elbow.

Rodriguez shouted, “We’ve got Glenn Anders. They just brought him in.”

Crobey gave her a long look. She had nothing to say; she felt helpless. Crobey looked at the heaped ordnance and then lifted his voice: “No trades, Rodrigo.”

“The hell with trades. This is the one who killed the Lundquist boy.” Rodriguez dropped Emil and Emil fell like a stone, quite obviously dead by the way he collapsed. “I guess we’ve had enough of this, Harry,” Rodriguez shouted. He flung his submachine gun away into the mud and shoved both hands in his pockets. His stance was defiant. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the smoke that poured up from the camp. “That’s my goddamn fishing boat you just burned up, you know that, Harry?”

She said, “What’s he raving about?”

“Shush a minute, ducks.”

“Listen, Harry — you hear me?”

“I hear you fine, Rodrigo.”

“You can have Anders, you’ll find him back in the trees there. And you can keep that stuff in the cave, Harry, it’s a gift from me to you. We’re taking both Jeeps. You’ll have a long walk down and you’ll have to backpack Anders but I need a half day’s jump on you. Time to get my wife and my girls out. All right?”

She murmured suspiciously, “It’s too easy.”

Crobey shook his head. He yelled, “Fair enough. Go on, Rodrigo, beat it.”

Rodriguez turned around and walked away, head down, hands in his pockets, kicking at stones in the mud. He disappeared into the trees. There were voices — a bit of argument, possibly — and then she heard movement in the woods down there. Silence after that, and she sat tense with her hands on the grenade ready to arm it; Crobey watched the trees unblinkingly. Then after a time they heard the Jeep engines roar, and growl away.

After that they heard nothing and Crobey slowly sagged back on his haunches.

She shook her head in disbelief. “It’s a trick, Harry.”

“No.” Then he leered at her. “You look like hell, ducks.”

“So do you.” His cheek had stopped bleeding but he was a mess.

“Can you walk?”

“I guess. But what if he’s left somebody out there with a rifle?”

“He hasn’t.” He took her arm. She had no resources left — only the fear that somebody out there was waiting to snipe at them when they exposed themselves. Harry cocked the Uzzi and held it one-handed, ready to shoot, and helped her walk out into the hazy dripping twilight.

Below the cave the fires were dying. She brooded for a while at Emil Draga’s corpse.

They went down slowly, Harry half carrying her, limping. “He’s not a bad bloke,” Harry said. At first she didn’t know who he was talking about. Then he said, “Mostly I guess it’s a mistake to get to know your enemy. You might turn out to like the bastard. I think you’d like Rodrigo.”

“Maybe.”

“Ducks—”

“What, Harry?”

“Thanks.”

She began to smile a little. She looked down at the wreckage of her clothing and the bruised patches of exposed skin. “I am a lovely sight for you, aren’t I,” she murmured. “I’d like to get cleaned up and then I’d like to get into a nice cool bar. With you.”

“Right, ducks. Let’s find Glenn, now.”

“Ah, Harry, I hate to admit such a ghastly cornball thing but I do love you. Without reservation. And I guess that will do,” she mused in surprise, “for openers.”