War From The Clouds

Chapter Three

There was no way I could use the gas bomb, even if I could get to it in time. I would have killed Antonio's friends in the stockade — and there were more of them than I first thought. The sound of the shots brought dozens of them out of low, mean huts into the stockade yard.

And guerillas and Cuban Marines were streaming out of barracks beyond the stockade. Running alone wouldn't do it for us. I had to create a diversion.

"Get the guards' rifles, and sidearms," I shouted to Antonio as I sprinted for the gate in the barbed wire fence. "Come on. Make it quick."

I opened the gate and the dissident guerillas came streaming out, going for the weapons that Antonio was already assembling in a pile. Antonio himself clutched a Russian automatic Volska and was priming the chamber for an assault on the on-rushing guards.

We both opened fire at the same time, Antonio with the wicked Volska, me with Wilhelmina and the forty five. The guerillas all hit the dirt, flat on their bellies. Some of them even turned and ran. But the Cuban Marines, better trained and better motivated, kept on coming.

Just when it looked as Antonio and I would be overwhelmed by the Marines, who had already opened fire on the run, a half-dozen of Antonio's friends took professional stances to our right and opened a withering fire against approaching Marines. Their three Volskas and three forty fives thundered in the dusty compound.

This time, even the Cubans took cover. There is such a thing as bravery and dedication: there is also such a thing as stupidity. The Cubans weren't stupid.

In that brief respite, while the Marines were seeking cover — and while some of them were shouting at the other guerillas to come out of hiding — I tugged Antonio's sleeve and nodded toward the narrow trail leading back into the jungle. Hopefully, it was the one leading to the camouflaged gate on wheels.

"We'll retreat in alternate waves," I said. "Let's take a point at the trail's entrance, then open fire while your friends fall back."

It worked like a charm. Or almost like one. It was aided by Antonio's unarmed friends who had been dashing around in the compound, creating confusion by looking for weapons. Some of them were brave enough to dash all the way to the first group of fallen Cubans to rob them of weapons.

Antonio and I, along with two of his rebel friends, took up positions at the entrance to the trail. We opened fire again on the regrouped Cubans, careful to miss Antonio's scrambling, hustling friends. As we fired, more than a dozen of the rebels dashed past us up the trail, found a high point on the hillside and began firing down on the Cubans.

"Okay. Our turn next. Let's get on the trail."

"No," Antonio said sharply. "I stay here until they're all dead."

He was one hard head. "Look, champ," I said, "if you don't move your ass right now, I'm going to pump a bullet into it. There's no time for arguments. Colonel Vasco's whole damned battalion will be here in a matter of minutes. Now move it."

To emphasize my command, I held the forty five aimed at his head. That surly look came back and he considered resisting even me. But he fired another burst from the Volska, sent a squad of Cubans flying into the dirt, and then hot-footed it up the trail. I went after him.

We reached the high point and I waved the rebels on. Three more had joined us and we took the high point to protect the trail's entrance. Unfortunately, we all ran out of bullets just as a huge gang of Cubans and Nicarxan guerillas reached the point we were trying to protect.

That's when I used Pierre. The little gas bomb sailed above the jungle and lit just in front of the running troops. They began instantly to gag as the pale blue cloud exploded around them. Antonio looked at me, incredulous, then a smile came to erase the surliness.

"Excellent work. You're killing them all."

"Not all," I said. "And if we don't move out of here, that gas will catch up to us on the wind. Let's go — and no arguments this time."

"I am with you," he said.

The five of us ran single file up the trail. It was so narrow that we could have defended it against an army if only we had enough ammunition. At the top of the trail, where the false wall was in place, the other dissidents had stopped, believing themselves to be hemmed in. There was a rumbling of anger as I came into the small clearing. I was the one they thought had led them into a trap.

I put on my best smile and held up my hands.

"Don't be alarmed, gentlemen," I said. "There's a way out. Unfortunately the leaders also know it, so we haven't much time. Listen closely."

I told them they were the nucleus of a counterrevolutionary group to overthrow Don Carlos, kick out the Cubans and make the necessary peace with the Apalcans. I established the high ledge above the valley floor overlooking the main Cuban contingent as our meeting place and soon-to-be command post. Most of them knew where it was.

"All right. As soon as we leave this compound, I want you to fan out on all the trails. Travel in twos. Find weapons and ammunition when and where you can. If you kill, don't let it be a waste. Take the time to search the man you kill. Take all his weapons. We'll meet on the ledge in six hours. That will be at 3 P. M."

They all nodded agreement and then gaped with astonishment as I pulled the huge rolling hunk of jungle from its nest. Laughing and grinning, they began to file through.

Right into the teeth of vicious gunfire.

Colonel Vasco's men had arrived and had sealed off this exit. Antonio's friends were dropping like flies. I felt a sickness seeing the massacre and knowing that I'd caused it, knowing that I was in it.

I neatly panicked then, considering it all lost. But I spotted two full ammo belts dropped by one of Antonio's friends. I snatched them up and grabbed Antonio's arm.

'This way. Back down the trail."

He started to resist, knowing that a return to the compound was probably suicide. But going ahead was certain suicide. He came along, snatching up an extra Volska as we ran.

Everything wasn't lost, though. I had learned one important lesson in traveling jungle trails with their unrelenting walls. The lesson was that jungle walls aren't all that unrelenting. Even the thickest walls of foliage have weak points, but it takes a trained and observant eye to spot those weak spots. On the way up the trail, I had spotted at least two areas where a man could push through and cover himself from behind.

I led Antonio to the nearest, we pushed through and crouched in the dim bower of leaves and vines. We'd no sooner settled on the damp, dark ground when footsteps came thundering past from below. Pierre had done his stuff, but there is a limit as to how long a gas bomb can remain effective. The trail was clear of gas below and the Cubans and guerillas were coming.

We waited, fearful of making a move or a sound. And then came voices, muffled and mumbling at first, then louder and closer. Along with the voices came the thrashing sounds of machetes hacking at the walls of the trail.

"He's still in the compound," came the shrill, angry voice of Colonel Ramon Vasco. "The fucking gringo has outsmarted all of you. Well, by God, you find him or you will all live to regret it. I want that man. Do you hear me?"

Christ, I thought, the whole Caribbean can hear you. I looked around to see if there were a way out of this cul de sac. There wasn't, unless we did a little of our own hacking. But we had no machetes and the noise would have pinpointed our hiding place.

I hadn't outsmarted the colonel's guerillas and Marines. I had outsmarted myself.

The colonel was still belching out orders, telling how he would personally find out the purpose of my mission before performing the indelicate surgical technique known among brutes as disembowelment, evisceration. The machetes were still hacking at the walls of the jungle on either side of the narrow trail, drawing closer to our niche.

I heard a scratching and scraping nearby and saw that Antonio was using his Volska rifle to work at the soft ground behind us.

"Que pasa?" I whispered. "What are you doing?"

"The soil is soft and most roots are not as strong as that which grows above the ground. We can dig our way through the roots."

At first, I thought he'd lost his mind. It would take hours, even days, to go more than a few yards in this thick jungle. Even as I was thinking that, Antonio lifted a huge clump of roots and soil and edged himself past it. He worked almost silently. What small scraping sounds he did make were covered by the shouts of the colonel, the hacking of the machetes and the grunting of the men wielding them.

I put my own rifle to work on a clump of bushes just ahead of Antonio. The dirt came away so easily that we might have been two kids on the beach, scooping out sand to bury the beach bully.

By the time the machetes were alongside our niche, we had progressed twenty feet into the jungle, replacing each bush we had dug up. There was virtually no sign of us having passed through. Or so we hoped.

"Ah, I thought I had found them," we heard a Cuban say, "but it's merely a small opening that leads nowhere."

"Don't dawdle," the colonel belched. "If they aren't there, move on down and find another opening. Find him. Find the fucking gringo."

We were safe. We were also exhausted, hungry, thirsty and very much in need of biological relief. We had worked ourselves into a place so small and tight with vines that we couldn't have worked a sneeze into our regimen without getting a hernia. So we lay there, gazing up through the thick foliage, watching tiny fingers of sunlight try to penetrate the gloom.

In a few minutes, the jungle was quiet, except for a muffled hacking down below. In an hour, there was no sound but the birds that had returned after the passing of the Cubans and the guerillas and the gas. Antonio was preparing to start working his way back to the trail, but I had a hunch that our enemies hadn't finished with the trail.

"Wait."

"For what? They are gone. They search for us elsewhere, and I have to move or I will die right here."

"You won't die unless you do move," I said. "Just wait."

Within minutes, we heard them on the trail again. They weren't looking for us now. They had come back to carry down the dead men, Antonio's friends who had been massacred when I opened up that damned gate.

"I must learn to listen to you, Senor," Antonio said, a ring of genuine gratefulness in his voice.

"You'd better learn something," I said, smiling at him, "or that hot head of yours will get you killed."

"It almost did," he said. "I spoke out too soon, before my friends were prepared to act. I was responsible for getting us all locked up in the compound and sentenced to die at noon today."

Somehow, I wasn't surprised. But I dropped the issue then. I fished out the chain and locket again and told him to read the note from Elicia. He did, straining in the dim light to make out the words. When he had read it, his face was part smile, part concern.

"I must thank you for saving her from that cruel fate," he said. "She is safe now, but what about my parents?"

"They refused to leave the farm. But I don't think the Cubans will bother them — they're so old and helpless, and they're blameless."

His face was a wicked scowl.

"You don't know these bastard Cubans," he said. "Their plans are long-ranging. When Don Carlos is in control, the Cubans will come in droves. They will be looking for land. Shrewd Cuban commanders are already having our old citizens killed and legally taking over their land. When others come, they will receive high prices for land taken by blood. They have every reason to kill my parents."

"And we have every reason to stop them, starting with Don Carlos."

"You make the commands," he said, smiling openly now, "and I will obey. Without question."

The boy had grown up very fast, the hard way.

But I waited another hour before we slipped out of our hiding place. We did it carefully, replacing each bush and vine we had uprooted. We had no reason to conceal the hiding place now, but I wanted that vicious colonel to think we'd slipped through his fingers by some kind of magic, or genius. I wanted him to over-estimate my powers. An enemy that over-estimates is just as vulnerable as one that under-estimates.

Three hours later, at noon, the time Antonio and his friends had been slated for execution, we were on the small ledge far below his parents' farm, where I had hidden my radio. I cranked up the batteries and tuned to the special frequency used by all AXE agents to make secret contacts from the field. As N3, the top Killmaster for AXE, a call on that frequency would clear the boards at the AXE office on DuPont Circle in Washington.

David Hawk, my boss, had never failed me. If a call came from me from the middle of the Pacific, there would be planes and/or nuclear submarines to my rescue within minutes. Once, Hawk had even commandeered a Navy aircraft carrier and all its planes to pluck me out of danger.

When I got the AXE office in Washington, I gave the coded response and asked for a direct link to David Hawk.

"Unavailable," came the terse response. "What is your message, N3?"

I tried to hide the disappointment in my voice as I described the hopelessness of assaulting Mount Toro and Alto Arete. I provided details given to me by Luis Pequeno (and confirmed by Antonio Cortez) about the thousand Marines, the backup guerillas, the broken trails, the fact that the sides of the mountain were seeded with poison-laden bits of metal. I told of Don Carlos Italla's plans for an all-out war in six days. I told of the anti-aircraft batteries operated by computers, of the minefields at the top and bottom of the mountain, of the electrified fence and the rabid guard dogs and armed monks. I told of Antonio's small group of dissidents, a few of whom had apparently escaped the ambush, and of others Antonio knew about and with whom we hoped to make contact. I told of the group coming from Apalca to meet with Don Carlos to plan Apalcan support for his revolution. Finally, I told of how Don Carlos would annihilate the peace commission trying to work out a treaty between Nicarxa and Apalca.

"And what is it you want from AXE?" the anonymous voice responded.

The way he asked the question made my insides quiver. His tone implied that no matter what I asked I wouldn't get it.

"The least I need is an airdrop of food, weapons and ammunition in a place I will designate," I said. "What I'd really like is a small detachment of Blue Light Commandos to help me neutralize…"

"One moment, please, N3," the curt voice said.

He was gone for a hell of a long time and I was beginning to understand Antonio's hotheadedness, his lack of patience. I wanted to fling the damned radio off the mountain.

"Special message from the President," the voice came back on. "There is to be no further involvement by this country. No airdrop. No detachment of commandos. You're to accomplish this mission on your own, N3, with no connection whatsoever with your country of origin."

"Dammit, man," I snapped, "my cover is already blown. They know I'm an American and they know I'm here to stop Don Carlos. They know…"

"Your problems to solve," the radio voice said. "You and you alone. Over and out, N3. Please do not contact us again on this frequency until your mission is completed and you wish to make your final report."

The radio went dead, the connection broken. I almost did throw the thing off the mountain, but Antonio was watching me closely for my reaction. I smiled, in spite of myself. So much for Hawk's readiness to pluck me out of trouble no matter where I was or how deep the trouble.

"You heard the man, Antonio. We're on our own."

He was about to say something when we heard the twig snap behind us. We had already loaded up the two Russian Volskas with the extra clips, but had thrown away the empty forty fives. They were too heavy to carry around, waiting to find extra clips. I had taped Wilhelmina to the small of my back, where she usually rested. I had stashed extra 9mm cartridges with the radio, but hadn't yet reloaded the luger.

Antonio was the first to respond. He flopped to his stomach and poked the bulky Volska out ahead of him, aiming at the direction of the noise of the breaking twig. I shuttled the radio back into its niche between three rocks, snatched up and pocketed two extra clips for Wilhelmina, then went to the firing position.

We waited perhaps three minutes, listening to silence from the forest behind our secure ledge. Birds called. Wind whistled up from the lovely Reina Valley. There was, however, no sign of human or animal presence near us. Antonio was about to rise again when we heard the snapping again. Then came several snappings. Christ, there must be a whole battalion out there. How had they found us?

The drop from the far end of the ledge was more than twenty feet, with no slant. At the bottom was a bare area of gravel and sharp rocks, then the thick jungle below that. Even if we made it over the side without breaking any bones — more specifically, our necks — we'd have a few dozen feet of open terrain to cross before reaching the cover of the jungle.

We had no choice. The hill behind us was filling up with Marines or guerillas, or both, getting into position to catch us in a crossfire that not even the ants would escape with their antennae intact.

Although I was convinced that they could see us, or had seen us earlier and were moving up by quadrant positions, I sensed another opportunity to build my image as a magician with the good Colonel Vasco. I motioned for Antonio to follow me.

Using my elbows as legs, I edged across the narrow ledge to one side, where the drop to the rocky area below wasn't quite so high or so steep. We eased over the edge like a couple of eels. We were no sooner dropping through space than I heard the sharp bark of the colonel.

"Fire, fire, fire! Annihilate them!"

He had obviously lost his desire to quiz me and then personally remove my intestines. He wasn't about to let me slip away again as he had back there on the compound trail.

Antonio and I hit the ground at the same time. He landed lightly, flipping over in the air to keep his feet. I miscued slightly and came down on an angle, pitching forward and clanking my ankle on an outcropping of rock. The pain rumbled up through my body like a tidal wave of pellets. I stifled a yell, unwilling to give the colonel even a brief moment of pleasure.

We were off and running — me limping — even before the Marines and guerillas stopped firing. We were in the dark trees before they appeared on the ledge above. I knew they would expect us to run straight down the steep hill through the trees.

"You go left," I said to Antonio, gasping from the pain that was still running its course through my bones. "I'll go right. Stay near the top of the hill. When you're clear, meet me at the lookout point I told about, the one overlooking the valley and Mount Toro."

Further instructions were cut off by a fusillade of bullets tearing through the trees. Antonio took off, as directed. I ran-limped the other way, hearing the shots above me and the bullets thudding into the rocky soil right behind me.

I hadn't gone twenty feet when the bullet caught me. It was a ricochet off a rock, but it was just as effective as if it had come straight from the muzzle of the Russian automatic weapon. I felt the dull thud in the soft part of my left side, toward the back. I kept running, though, waiting for a hail of bullets to cut me down.

I made it three hundred yards before I collapsed from the pain. My ankle throbbed like a tympanny drum. My side, bleeding profusely now, felt as though a shark had taken a bite out of it. Weakness came with the pain and I had to rest.

There were no further gunshots from above. Soon, though, I heard them thrashing down through the trees. Most of the search party was heading downhill, but the colonel, wising up to me now, had sent some of his men on sideways sortees. It wouldn't take too many of them to finish me off.

I got, up, ignoring the pain and weakness as much as was humanly possible — which wasn't much — and stumbled along for another two hundred yards, then started straight downhill. I was giving them a hell of a lot of jungle to search. I just hoped I didn't get lost in the process.

Within an hour, I was lost, and didn't care. The pain was a steady rasping throughout all of me, no longer concentrated in my ankle and side. Weakness was also constant, and building with galloping speed. I could tell that my mind was flirting with delerium and I tried to keep clear thoughts, make clear decisions.

But one trail looked like another. All streams seemed to be the same stream that I had already crossed, and re-crossed. All rocks in my path seemed like rocks I had fallen over miles back. I went on and on, up and down the hill. Sometimes, I rambled over high ranges where the trees were sparse and the going easy. Sometimes, I plunged down steep ravines and found myself in thick jungle where the going was all but impossible.

I kept on, knowing that it was necessary to lose myself in order to lose the enemy. I knew also that I had to stop the bleeding in my side or I would simply phase myself out in that thick jungle. I stopped at a stream beside a mossy bank. I took off my shirt, with painful exactitude, and looked at the wound. It was ragged. The bullet must have been in the process of breaking up when it struck me. There were at least three punctures, one large and two small. Blood was streaming from each of them.

I tore off a piece of my shirttail, having the presence of mind to make a small mental pun about tearing off a piece of tail, and gathered up some wet moss. I wrapped the moss in the fragment of shirt material and, using the tape that had held Wilhelmina in place, I stuck the soggy bandage against the wound and taped it into place.

New pain shot through me, threatening to black me out. I took deep breaths and remember thinking how nice it would be to crawl inside that mossy bank and to go to sleep, only to awaken as a carefree and unhunted insect or worm. What sweet bliss that would be.

Strangely, the memory of Elicia's farewell kiss was what brought a sense of reality to my mind. I remembered that dark night on the dirt road near her cousin's hut when she had stood on tiptoe to kiss me, sweetly, firmly. I hadn't been kissed in so innocent and pleasant a fashion since I was a teenager in high school. Perhaps my fond recollection of that kiss had something to do with the fact that Elicia, if she were in the United States, would be a relatively carefree teenager in high school. Instead, she was a peasant girl on this tormented island, open prey to the two-legged animals from another island, destined to grow old, abused, wornout and desolate by the time her teen years had barely gone by. My God, I thought, we Americans really have it soft.

And then I mentally crossed out the "we." At the moment, I was one American who didn't qualify for the soft life.

I moved on then, and the pain strangely abated in my side. My ankle continued to make its presence known, though, so the going was still difficult. By mid-afternoon, I had just about had it. My thoughts were weird and detached and I knew that I was getting delirious by leaps and bounds.

I saw myself running naked on a Caribbean beach, pursued by a flock of naked beauties. Even as I was considering turning to face them, and my delicious fate, the image shattered and I was sliding down a mountain of hot lava, feeling my body actually being cooked by the intense heat. I went suddenly cold and aroused to find myself submerged in a cold, fast-running creek. The water was loosening the bandage over my wound and I crawled from the creek to dry myself on leaves and to re-apply the bandage.

Hunger rose again in my stomach with a great rumbling. I couldn't be starving. It had been just over twenty four hours since I had eaten, but I had been burning up a lot of calories in that time. And losing a lot of blood.

After an hour or so resting on the creek bank where I failed to build up energy, as hoped, I struck off up a worn path that led up over a slight rise. It wasn't a steep rise, but climbing it was like trying to scale the south wall of Mount Everest. I reached the top, saw that the path disappeared into a wooded ravine, and decided to go down and see where the path led.

I took two steps, my ankle twisted on a rock and sent a searing pain through all my joints. I felt myself passing out and looked skyward for a point in reality. Nothing was real up there. Clouds floated in an azure sky, but they were no longer real to me. They could have been marshmallows in blue jello for all I knew.

The sky suddenly began to race before my eyes. I didn't know that I was falling until I hit the ground and felt stones scraping my face and hands. I was sliding down into the ravine where, something in my demented mind told me, great nests of jungle snakes waited to devour me after filling me with their painful poison.

I awoke and was on my back. There was no cloud-filled blue sky above me. There was a network of vines, expertly thatched into a roof. Around me were walls of the same jungle material, showing the hand of man. To my left was a door, open, showing a small clearing and then green jungle beyond. It seemed to be dusk out there. Or dawn.

The weakness was still with me, but my mind seemed to be functioning clearly. I couldn't feel any pain in my side or my ankle, yet I didn't feel as though I'd been drugged.

The room formed by the thatched walls and roof was small, as though designed for keeping a man or an animal in captivity. It reminded me of a hut used in an African prison camp in which I once spent a few months before Hawk found me and rescued me. But it wasn't hot in this room, the way it had been in the African version.

I started to sit up, to get my bearings a bit better. Something held me and I realized then that I was tied securely. My hands and arms were outspread and tied to stakes driven into the clay earth. Even my head was tied, with soft vines wrapped around it and attached to a stake somewhere behind me. Beneath my torso was a soft pallet of thatched jungle growth.

Strangely, I felt no fear at being tied up in this small, low-ceilinged hut. It was the drugs that made me feel safe, the same drugs that had taken away my pain. But I didn't know that yet.

In place of fear was the whimsical, almost comical, feeling that I was Gulliver reincarnated, that a jungle version of the Lilliputians had tied me in this small hut. I half expected to see tiny, six-inch Indians tippy-toeing into the hut to laugh at me, to point with triumph at the giant they had captured and tied with their little vines.

My first impulse, then, was to call out, to find out if tiny creatures had really brought me here — and why. I thought better of it, knowing that small creatures like the Lilliputians existed only in literature and in the minds of demented people. Something large and real had done this to me. My last memories had been of scudding down a path into a ravine. Yet, I felt no pain in my face and hands that must have been abraded badly in that fall.

Although natural fear didn't build in me — again because of the drugs — I did have a natural suspicion that no sane man, or no friend, would have brought me to this hut and staked me to the ground. Why I hadn't been killed, I didn't know. My mind began to conjure up all sorts of grisly plans my captor might have for me.

I was once again toying with the idea of calling out, to get to the bottom of this mystery if only to satisfy my curiosity and get the atrocities over with, when a shadow fell across the open door. I heard a scuffling footstep outside.

And then a huge, hulking figure appeared in the doorway. It was so tall that I could see only its legs. The figure knelt, and kept on kneeling. I guessed the man's height at around seven feet.

He was staring at me from the open doorway. The light behind him kept me from seeing his face and clothes clearly. But it was obvious that he was a giant and, in that dim light of dusk (it was growing darker, so I knew it wasn't dawn), I could see his eyes sparkling and shiny.

With a sharp drawing in of my breath, I remembered the description I'd been given of Don Carlos Italla. I could hear old Jorge Cortez's words as though he were in the hut with me:

A giant of seven feet, a mountainous specimen of three hundred pounds, eyes like ingots of burning phosphorus, hands that could shred stainless steel slabs. A fury of a monster with a booming voice like the rumble of thunder.

In that moment I knew that Don Carlos Italla's men had found me in that ravine, had brought me here to this hut and staked me down. They had also drugged me to keep me docile.

I knew this for a fact. But I felt no real fear. My only regret, as I peered back at the giant with the massive hands and red, sparkling eyes, was that I hadn't given in to my earlier urges to buy and operate a truck garden along a quiet highway in Ohio.

Soon, there wouldn't be any quiet highways. And no Nick Carter either.