“Right,” Frank said flatly.
“Smell’s almost gone,” Barnstone said placidly.
“Mota smell’s almost gone,” Jimmy said, “but the bullshit still stinks.”
“Sorry,” Barnstone said as if he meant it, turned away.
One group of men began to scrub the floor with piles of crushed chilies, which would surely kill the last remnants of the odor of the marijuana bales, while another group began to unload the semi. It was full of washing machines, televisions, microwave ovens, VCRs, and other electronic gear.
“You got a fucking appliance store?” Jimmy said.
“Sort of,” Barnstone said, then blushed and turned to look me in the eye, adding, “Look, man, when I got out of the drug business—and I have been out all these years; that last shipment, a buddy of mine, when the plane went down, his ass was hanging out, and I owed him, so we took it out—but I still had all the contacts, all the routes, and all the equipment. So I go the other way now, hauling freight, you know, so rich Mexicans can avoid the import taxes …” Then he blushed so hard he had to turn away.
Jesus, he was embarrassed. It was hard to get your mind around it, given Barnstone’s two tours in Vietnam, one as a riverboat commander, the other as a SEAL, and given his twenty years as a drug kingpin, hard to realize that he didn’t want his friends to see him acting like a child. Perhaps somebody should learn how to smuggle common sense into the human psyche.
It took Jimmy and Frank a moment to get it, then they laughed wildly, but I didn’t know what to say, then I did.
Thirty-six hours later, just before moonrise and just outside Boquillas del Carmen, Coahuila, Mexico, we loaded into the closed bed of an American Army surplus three-quarter-ton truck. Barnstone and Jimmy had flown in with our side arms and the crate the Dahlgren twins had shipped to El Paso; Solly and Norman had crossed legally, flown from Ciudad Juárez to Monterrey then Monclova, where they joined our Mexican cohorts and checked out the road north; then Frank, Wynona, and I, playing drunk gringos, had crossed the Rio Grande by rowboat at dusk, just in case Joe Don had the border crossings watched.
Wynona had resisted all our efforts to leave her behind, as had a series of Mexican maps and officials who wouldn’t or couldn’t tell us where to find Sarita’s family hunting camp. For a while after Wynona first bowed her neck, it looked as if Wynona was not just going along, but going alone and also taking Baby Lester with her. Finally, she wore us down, then agreed quickly to leave Baby Lester with Dottie and Mary, then went to work with the breast pump to store up goodies for the little guy.
Barnstone claimed that the two guys driving the three-quarter were Mexican military officers, but they looked like banditos to me. At least until they opened their mouths. They spoke better English than most of us, especially the one who looked like Dagoberto’s brother. We drove until just before dawn, bouncing like marbles in a sink in the back of the unsprung truck as it fought the unimproved dirt track, then bivouacked in a huisache grove. We set up camp and camouflaged the truck as the officers wiped out our trail where it left the road. Nobody knew what we were getting into, but everybody remembered Wynona’s line: “Them that didn’t run, fucking died.”
After a breakfast of cold beans and stale tortillas, we spread out the officers’ military maps and even some high-altitude shots that must have come from the DEA. The two officers had no trouble locating the runway on the map and in the photos, but neither had any idea where the lodge might be.
“I remember,” Wynona said, “that we came past the runway, then up a narrow, dry wash to a really steep grade. We had to back and fill at all the switchbacks, and Flavio’s Jeep nearly didn’t make it … But when we topped the rise, man, it was like something in the movies, a little blind canyon and a hidden valley. Waterfalls and creeks and deer and the whole fucking ball of wax.
“No, it was better than the movies. It looked like Montana …”
Wynona mined that vein for a few minutes, then came back to the serious part.
“It’s a huge log house, you know, perched below an outcrop, and you probably can’t see the house or the road from the air because of the pines. They looked like ponderosas, but down here, I just don’t know.”
“And the house looks out over the valley,” I said, “and one guy can cover the whole thing with a BB pistol …”
“Well, it’s not my fault,” Wynona said, then flounced off behind a rock to pee.
We all tried not to look at each other as we listened to the splash of urine, tried not to look at the dark trail that circled the other side of the rock and lost itself in the sharp gravel.
Finally, one of the Mexicans said, “Goddamned ricos, they hide their shit even when they aren’t doing anything illegal …”
Then his partner said something in Spanish, and the first one replied in Spanish. They chatted until Wynona came back around the rock. My command of the language was even more minimal than hers, but I could tell they were talking politics. It’s all the Latin cognates. Later, I thought, I would ask her again about the conversations in Sun Valley. But first we had to sleep. And in spite of the hard ground, sharp rocks, and thin bedrolls, sleep we did.
When I woke at dusk from a dreamless sleep, I eased Wynona’s leg off mine, then rolled off the bedroll. Beyond the three-quarter, Frank and Jimmy and the two officers hunkered around a small, smokeless fire boiling coffee, chattering softly. I took my toilet and joined them.
“How goes it, companeros?” I said, pouring coffee the consistency of old motor oil.
“We were telling these gentlemen what a bad-ass and a fearless leader you were,” Jimmy said.
“Why’s that, Mr. Gorman?” I asked, waiting for the joke.
Frank took a deep breath, then spoke with great seriousness: “Because neither one of us has had a nightmare since we hooked up with you, Sughrue.”
“Neither has he, I’ll bet,” Solly said as he hopped on one foot around the latrine rock. “And he’s been considerably sweeter over the telephone,” Solly added, “when he bothers to telephone at all.”
“You guys pick on somebody your own age,” I growled. Since I had served some time playing Army football, I was an old guy of twenty-seven by the time I got to Vietnam.
“Or a cripple,” Solly said, perching on a rock to reattach his prosthesis. Then he looked up to stare into the fire. “I figured out how to fox the nightmares years ago.”
Only Jimmy bothered to bite. “How’s that, Captain?”
Solly fixed him with a stare that looked right through him. “I gave up sleep, soldier,” he said so softly we had to lean toward him to hear and believe. “I quit fucking sleeping.” Then he laughed hollowly. “That’s the secret of my success, right, Sughrue?” he said, then laughed again.
By then, the rest of the bunch was awake, so we feasted on another guerrilla marching meal of beans and tortillas, broke camp, and headed for the happy valley of Wynona’s Montana dreams and the elusive Sarita Pines.
“Well, they’re sure as hell there,” Barnstone said as he handed me the bulky German binoculars. “I counted ten,” he added. “Except for their weapons they looked as much like hard-hat NVA as anything I’ve seen since the real thing.”
I scanned the front porch as quickly as I could before the morning sun topped the ridge above the lodge, then passed the glasses to Frank. “Quick,” I said, “watch the sun, but see if those guys don’t look familiar.”
It only took Frank a second to look and agree. The last time we’d seen two of these guys, they had been heading south into the mountains of Colorado. Four of the others we had left afoot in the New Mexican desert. Two we didn’t know, and two more were women with submachine guns slung across their chests. Changing the guard and cooking breakfast over a tiny fire built on the top of a steel drum. Two brand-new four-wheel-drive Japanese vans were parked just below the porch. And above it all, standing tall and slim on a second-story balcony, Sarita Pines stood wrapped in a wool sarape, her pale Spanish face gl
owing in the morning air. Sarita looked more like the commander in chief than the prisoner.
Then the sun broke the crest, and we had to whistle Jimmy in from flank security and belly down the reverse slope toward the temporary safety of our dry, cold camp.
The night before, the Mexican officers had taken us as far as a gulch just off the canyon mouth beyond the runway, unloaded our gear, then hiked back over the rocky ridge to the main road. Barnstone took his cellular telephone and climbed a nearby rise to arrange for a plane to wait at a strip outside Musquiz in case we needed to be extracted faster than the ancient three-quarter could run. Then we made a slow and easy scout up to happy valley. We had to threaten to bind and gag Wynona to make her stay behind.
Now back at midmorning we knew what we faced. Without coffee or cigarettes, we sucked on coffee beans and gathered to consider our plight. Except everybody looked at me as if it were my plight alone.
“Looks like it’s up to you, Sughrue,” Solly said, smiling. “Go. No go.”
“Nope. It’s up to Norman,” I answered, “it’s his mom.”
Norman looked at the rocky ground. “I can’t ask you guys to take on something like that,” he said slowly. “You’re the only person here I know, Sughrue, and I can’t even ask you to go up against those kinda odds. But I’m going to at least go up and see if those guys will let me talk to her, see if she is my mom …”
Wynona spit on a flat rock between them, then said, “Well, fuck Norman. He doesn’t even know if Sarita’s really his mom. But I know she’s my friend and she’s in trouble. And I’ll bet the son of a bitch who killed Mel is up there laughing about it. So I’m going no matter what you guys do.” Then she stared at me as if I were a shit-weasel trying to squirm out of my bound duty.
“Fuck it,” I said, “I never had any choice.”
“If you’re waiting on me, you’re walking backward,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t know what that means,” Frank said in a fake country accent, “but I’m bound to dance with the one that brung me.”
Barnstone nodded slowly, then smiled. Solly just looked at me.
“You guys,” Norman said, then stopped. “I guess all this bullshit started with me, but I know that woman’s my mom.” Then he turned to Wynona. “And don’t you be spitting on the ground again, little girl.”
“Fuck you, you walleyed son of a bitch,” Wynona said, but didn’t spit this time.
Then they all looked at me again. So I had no choice. I stepped over to crack the lid off the Dahlgren boys’ crate of arms.
“Let’s hit them just at sunset,” I said. “They’ll think we’re coming out of the sun. Frank and Jimmy and I have all day to get above and behind the lodge.” I started loading weapons, a grease gun first. “Norman,” I said as I pitched it to him, “your legs are too fucked for the climb …” Then I pulled the BAR out of the crate. “But the first thing they’ll do is send a couple of guys to take out the BAR, so you can cover the position …”
“And I’m the fucking cripple who has to cover the retreat,” Solly said before I could toss him the automatic rifle.
“Right,” I said. “There’s a little draw that angles off just below the ridgeline where you have at least three positions with a clear field of fire at the lodge. It’s at least eight hundred yards, and you’ll want to stay way high and to the left until we come out, but that shouldn’t be a problem …” Then I dug up Barnstone’s German glasses and handed them to Wynona. “Because this young lady is going to shut up, follow orders, and spot and load for you.” For once I thought Wynona was going to do what somebody said for a change. But I was wrong.
“What about a weapon for me?” she demanded. It took the Glock and one of the carbines to placate her. I made sure it was switched to semiautomatic so she didn’t spray Solly and Norman.
Then I dug in the crate again. “God love those fat boys,” I said when I found an assortment of grenades—two smoke, two fragmentation, and two of the new flash-bang concussion-and-confusion babies hostage teams used—then I looked at Norman. “You know,” I said, “if you weren’t such a jealous asshole, they might have shipped their Sherman tank down here.” But Norman didn’t laugh. So I continued, “So, Barnstone, you’re going to have to be my tank. And my diversion.”
“Okay.”
“What the hell is your first name, anyway?” I said.
“Roland.”
“Okay, Barnstone. You drive the three-quarter up the road and stay low until they fire at you, then get the fuck out of it and behind one of those big-ass pine trees until we come out of the lodge and you can cover us.”
“If you come out,” Solly said.
“That’s the kinda pissant officer attitude that cost us the fucking war,” Jimmy said. And nobody argued with him.
“When we come out,” I repeated, then picked up an M-1 Garand from the crate. When I held it up, it felt like a rock—warm, steady, and heavy—and I knew I could shoot the nuts off a gnat at five hundred yards.
“It’ll work,” I said to nobody in particular, as I lifted three Kevlar vests from the crate, another blessed gift from the twins. “It’ll fucking work.”
And it damn near did.
After six hours of rock and thorn, slim concealment and thin mountain air, and a belated appreciation of our misspent youths, Jimmy and Frank and I huddled at the edge of the small patch of scree below the outcropping of rotten stone, some twenty yards above the rear of the lodge. We had made the last rush an hour before when the guard had changed.
I had to have a heart-stopping hit of speed just to get my breath back. Frank joined me reluctantly, because the climb had seemed to age him twenty years, the dark lines of his face as deep as knife scars. But Jimmy declined, already bursting with excitement. So we watched the sun touch the rim of the valley below and listened to the whine of the transfer case of the three-quarter as it growled slowly up the slope below the lodge, its noise overwhelming the soft grumble of an undergound generator and the muted murmurs of a televised Mexican soap opera that drifted out of the back windows of the lodge.
The guard patrolling the back door stopped and turned at the sound of the truck. As I covered him with the M-1, Jimmy steadied the suppressor of the .22 on the back of his wrist, which rested on a waist-high rock, then shot the guard three times in the side of the head. We ducked, waited for somebody to notice; when nobody did we scrambled down the slope, the small sounds of our rush hidden by the sound of the truck.
Frank boosted Jimmy to the small gable over the back door, where he paused a minute, crouched below the window, trading his .22 for a grease gun, then he smiled down at us, grinning like a bad, bad leprechaun—the one who knows the pot of gold is a thunder jug full of old, watery crap—then he rolled silently over the windowsill as I held the back door open for Frank to slip inside.
The four guys gathered around the kitchen table watching television couldn’t have been more surprised if we had been mountain gorillas or ghosts; they confronted us with open mouths and empty hands. Frank covered them with the shotgun as I covered the long hallway leading toward the front door, where I could see other people watching the truck grind up the road. The guys at the table stayed still long enough for Frank to whisper something in Spanish to the effect that they could raise their hands and live.
But some poor bastard stepped out of the hall toilet, whooped when he saw me in the kitchen, and dug madly for the stainless-steel automatic strapped under his coat. Like an asshole I pulled the trigger of the M-1 until I heard the ping of the clip flying out.
Mostly, I think, I missed his vital parts. At that range it didn’t much matter. The muzzle blast tore his forearm in half, set fire to his blanket coat, and sent him reeling down the narrow hallway toward the front door where a not-so-innocent bystander fell forward through the shattered glass, a victim of unaimed fire.
With the ping of my empty clip, the guy nearest me at the table rushed me while the others scrabbled for their weapons, the cheap Ch
i-Com version of the Soviet AK. I butt-stroked mine into eternity while Frank piled the others like bloody rags into a corner by the stove with buckshot rounds. Then he calmly reloaded while I checked the bodies and unloaded their weapons, except for one, then I shoved another clip into the M-1.
Upstairs the grease gun stuttered, answered by the clatter of an assault rifle, distant sounds to our ringing ears, and the BAR began taking the shingles off the roof and the glass out of the far side of the house.
“She’s up here!” Jimmy screamed between bursts.
With Sarita upstairs, Frank and I could escalate. I jerked a fragmentation grenade off my vest and pulled the pin as Frank fired five rounds around the corner of the hallway. While he reloaded, I tossed the grenade atop the two bodies in the doorway, jerked as many rounds as I could through the fake Kalashnikov before it jammed, then scuttled back behind the refrigerator.
Some screams and curses and running footsteps followed the explosion, and the BAR rounds stopped chewing at the side of the lodge. Frank and I cleared the downstairs rooms carefully, checked the porch, from which we could see four guys making tracks across the small valley, the BAR kicking up dust at their feet whenever they paused. I emptied the M-1 again, knocking one down with a ricochet or a rock, but he bounced up like a ball and chugged across the valley floor.
“Great weapon,” I huffed to Frank.
“Different war,” he sighed, so I unholstered the Browning for the rest of the close work.
Then there was a distant rattle of small-arms fire from down the hillside, and the BAR stopped. The running guys paused, then Barnstone threw a magazine of hunt-and-hope rounds at them from the carbine, and they trudged on without another hesitation. A few moments later, the BAR kicked in again, its deep booming crack filling the valley. But the rounds weren’t coming our way.
“What the fuck?” Frank said, then we went back inside to clear the second floor, which had been silent since the grenade.