One of the men he’d staked out along the tree line near the water’s edge came over to join him, casting a worried look out at the lake as he said, “The boys were asking about Sancho. He does not seem to be about. I am his friend, I do not think he is a coward, but . . .”
“Get back to your post. Sancho is where I told him to be. I can’t say as much for you!”
“I will tell them you sent Sancho somewhere, Captain Gringo. Forgive me, but your orders were not clear as to what we are to do should we see a gunboat out there.”
The American said, “I make up orders as I go along. Right now, we don’t know they’re even coming. They got a radio message from a spy about the important meeting down the lake. They probably sent a shore party in to tally the dead. They may be satisfied if they killed most of the local leaders.”
The mestizo nodded and said, “I hope you are right. But what do we do if there is no more fighting on this side of the lake, this revolution?”
“You get to pick bananas and live another year. I told you to get back to your post.”
The man saluted awkwardly and left. Captain Gringo took another drag on his smoke and considered his own words. Gaston was getting farther away by the minute. And there might be mounted patrols between here and there, now. He knew the Frenchman would get through, if anybody could. But did he dare stay here another week or more?
He cursed Signor Marconi and his fucking new invention as he wondered if the ruling junta knew about Gaston and himself. He’d fooled with the radio gear Rosalita had found under Lupelita’s bed, but the stuff was hardware junk. He could probably wire it up to send a message, but he couldn’t pick one up. Gaston wasn’t packing a Marconi receiver, and he couldn’t think of anyone else he had a message for.
He spotted a smudge on the horizon and a man ran over to him to shout, breathlessly, “Out there, to the southwest, a steamboat!”
Captain Gringo nodded and said, “I see it.” He wondered how the order about the whites of their eyes would translate into Spanish. He settled for saying, “Listen to me. I want you to pass the word. Every man is to hold his fire and stay under cover, no matter what, until I give an order %o do something more interesting. I don’t care what anyone else says or does. Nobody moves until I order them to. Tell them I’ll shoot any man who makes a move before I say to. Get going.”
“That smoke is headed our way, señor.”
“Yeah, and you’re still standing there with your thumb up your ass. Shake a leg, soldier!”
The worried guerrilla trotted off and the American decided he had time for one more smoke. It was a gunboat, all right. Making twelve knots and steaming in like it owned the whole lake. It probably thought it did.
He lit a fresh smoke from the butt of his old one, and flicked the butt into the mud between his position and the water’s edge. He sat there quietly until his second smoke was half finished and the boat was close enough to make out the white-clad figures moving around on the deck. He stood up, casually, and waved. Then he drifted back to the cover of some barrels near the track running out on the dock. If they’d seen him at all, he hadn’t acted like a guilty party. He saw the deck guns were still covered with canvas tarps to protect them from the rain. Things were looking up. It didn’t look like they intended to stand offshore and shell the hacienda. They probably didn’t want to waste the shells on a helpless target. They knew Don Marin’s widow was the most important person left here. Or, at least, they thought they did.
Some men with rifles and puttees over the legs of their sailor pants were gathering on the bow as the gunboat tooted its whistle. Yeah, it was a standard mopping up procedure. They intended to land, cow the leaderless peons, and make a few arrests to set an example. They’d search for guns, steal some chickens, and rape a few women before they left. They were probably looking forward to it. Sometimes he thought the regulars down here encouraged revolutions for the sport it afforded them.
The boat reversed screws and churned backwater as it coasted in to the end of the dock. As the blunt bow bumped into the soggy timbers a seaman leaped off with a line and ran to secure it to a hardwood cleat. Captain Gringo braced his revolver across the barrels but held his fire as they secured another line and started to manhandle a gangplank over the bow for the landing party. Then he took a deep breath, drew a bead on the clump of eager riflemen about to disembark, and emptied the .38 into them, shouting, “Ahora, muchachos! Kill the motherfuckers!”
The men in the gunboat’s bow reeled back in confusion, more than one going down, as the other guerrillas opened up from cover all along the shoreline. Captain Gringo left the smoking pistol on the barrel tops and snatched up a Winchester he’d found in the quarters of Cyclops when he searched them. He spotted a crewman trying to whip the canvas from the breech of a deck gun and muttered, “No you don’t!” as he blasted the man away from the breech and over the far side. The firing grew ragged as the exposed gunboat crew made it back to cover and now some of them were shooting back, wildly, with small arms.
He fired at the windows of the bridge, as someone inside with sense dropped the sheet iron shutters over the glass. He knew the superstructure of the gunboat was armored, albeit thinly, but he kept bouncing slugs off it anyway to keep them rattled as he muttered, “Sancho, where the hell are you?”
A muddy line of little geysers sprouted along the edge of the lake as someone on the gunboat opened up with a machine gun. It sounded like a Maxim, but he couldn’t spot the son of a bitch. Then he saw the haze of blue smoke above the bridge and swore. They had a machine gun behind the fucking armor plate and it was swinging his way!
He flattened out in the mud behind the barrels as the machine gun tap-danced slugs at his position and proceeded to blow his cover to flying splinters. He couldn’t rise to run without getting his butt shot off, so he just lay there, cursing, as barrel staves and smaller chunks rained down on him.
Then he grinned as he felt the earth begin to tingle under him and as he heard the chuffing sound of a speeding locomotive he said, “Sancho, I love you!” and rolled to one side with the rifle. As he heard the machine-gun fire shift away from him he propped himself up on one elbow in time to see the little Shay narrow gauge coming down the track with a full head of steam! The men on the boat saw it, too, and they were pumping lead as it roared toward the dock. They shot out the headlight and spanged paint off the smoke box. The little engine’s stack was torn off by a burst of machine-gun fire, and steam was hissing like dragon’s breath from a dozen bullet holes in the boiler now. But Sancho had sent it down the track with a full head and the throttle tied wide open. Its momentum would have carried it another mile without a pound of pressure. It didn’t have to go a mile. It hit the end of the dock, ran out across it doing thirty miles an hour, jumped the tracks at the end, and dove headfirst into the gunboat!
There was a horrendous roar as both the locomotive’s and the gunboat’s boilers met amidships in a high-pressure embrace and climaxed together. Planking, armor plate, and other bits and pieces rained from the sky as Captain Gringo rose to run toward the dock. A human body, blown out of its pants, landed wetly in front of him and he jumped over it as he charged the massive white cloud enveloping the end of the dock.
His followers were boiling in from all sides, now, laughing like maniacs. He got to the end of the dock, saw what looked like a human head bobbing fifty yards offshore, and raised his rifle. Then the head went under, but not before he’d seen the swish of the shark’s tail in the water. There were others moving in now, attracted by the noise and the taste of blood in the shallows. Someone he couldn’t see in the steam screamed, “Madre de Dios, tiberones!” and the American swallowed the green taste in his mouth.
Sancho joined him and asked, “Did I do right, my captain?”
Captain Gringo said, “I just put you in my will.” Then he shouted to the others, “Hold your fire, damn it. Can’t you see we won?”
He spotted a man crawling ashore on his hands and knees to their north and added, “You there, Pedro! Go help that sailor and make sure nobody hurts him.”
Sancho said, “You are wasting kindness on the cabrones, my captain.”
But the American said, “Kindness, shit, I want to talk to him! You guys down here ought to learn to take prisoners. You can’t question a corpse worth a damn.”
The steam was clearing, although the wreckage still bubbled and hissed as sharks circled it with their questing fins. He saw much of the debris was still above the surface in the shallows and pointed his chin at the stub of a mast with a strand of copper draped from it like a broken kite string. He said, “They had a radio as well as a machine gun on the bridge. Let’s see if that sailor can tell us if they got off a message before we wrecked their plans.”
He left the dock with Sancho at his side and strolled over to the men clustered around the half drowned sailor. They were taking turns shoving him and the American said, “That’s enough. The man’s a prisoner of war, not a volleyball.”
As he joined them, the prisoner straightened up and tried to look dignified. He was a kid of about seventeen in a midshipman’s uniform. Captain Gringo nodded at the boy and said, “You’re a damned good swimmer. What’s your name?”
The midshipman sniffed and said, “I am Hernando Vargas y Herrerra y Somosa-Garcia and I spit in your mother’s milk!”
“I piss on your father’s grave. Now that we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s go up to the house and have a talk.”
“I have nothing to say to you, Gringo. Hey, what’s a gringo doing with these bandits? You gringos are supposed to be on our side!”
The American smiled and said, “You see? We both have things we want to know. Come on, you look like you could use a drink.”
He turned to one of his followers and added, “I left an empty pistol somewhere over by those shattered barrels. Give me that one you’re packing, if it’s loaded. Hernando and I will be in the kitchen if you need us.”
The mestizo nodded and handed over his old Colt, aware the gun he was getting in exchange was nickel-plated. Captain Gringo checked to make sure it was loaded and dropped it in his holster. Then he took the frightened boy by the arm and said, “Let’s go. Oh, Sancho, see what you can salvage from the wreckage, will you? Don’t mess with the shells and don’t let anyone else play with them. Just gather up any small arms and ammo. There should be some first-aid kits in what’s left of the bridge. If you see anything that looks like a radio, bring it over to the house on the double.”
He led the captive through the trees and into Consuela’s kitchen. He said, “Have a seat on that stool and don’t act silly. You don’t have an audience and we’re both professionals.”
The midshipman perched warily on the stool near the table as the American found a bottle in a cupboard and put it down between them, remaining on his own feet. He said, “I could probably find some glasses, but what the hell. You must have been up on the bridge when we wrecked you. What did you do, dive, when you saw the show was over?”
The boy ignored the bottle of rum and said, “You are right. I am a trained fighter. You seek to lull me into spilling my guts before you shove me against the wall, no?”
“No. I don’t play that way. I may be giving away an advantage, but I’ll give you my word, up front. You’re not going to be mistreated as long as you behave yourself.”
“Ha, next you’ll tell me you intend to let me go, eh?”
“We might work something like that. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Hernando. I’m going to put my cards on the table. You have a drink or stuff the bottle up your ass. If you don’t like my cards, you don’t have to play.”
The captive eyed him warily, reached for the bottle, and pulled the cork with his teeth. He spit it on the table and said, “I will listen. I offer nothing more.”
“Right. I’m not a rebel. I’m a gunrunner. I’m waiting here for a friend to get back and we figure it will take about a week or so. You know your side has shot the shit out of the local opposition and I had to kill Cyclops, the only really mean guy your friends might still be worried about. There’s nobody within miles of this place but a mob of harmless peones.”
The midshipman took a swallow, gasped, and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Then he smiled bitterly and said, “You call them harmless? ¡Madre de Dios!”
Captain Gringo chuckled and said, “All right, they can fight if someone leads them. I sunk you because I don’t like noise. You might have noticed it was your skipper’s idea to come here. I didn’t go looking for him.”
“They told us it was a simple mopping up operation. We had a list of names and a couple of our own friends to pick up.”
“Cyclops and a girl called Lupelita? They’re not here. I told you I killed Cyclops and the girl is missing. You may have killed her, yourself, when you shelled that other hacienda.”
The boy shrugged and said, “I don’t know any names. My rank did not call for me to be consulted on the captain’s plans.”
“I’ll buy that. I was a cadet one time. Here’s my position. I don’t give a damn who wins or loses down here. I aim to stay alive. If I can, I’d like to keep a handful of people I’m fond of alive. I want to do it with as little fuss as possible. How long do you think I’ve got before they send another gunboat looking for yours?”
The boy shrugged and said, “I don’t know. They’ll surely start searching for La Golandrina when she fails to return to port.”
“When were you guys due back, and where were you based?”
The boy took another swig of rum, took a deep breath, and said, “Fuck you. I told you I would not tell you anything.”
Sancho came in, grinning, with a muddy machine gun cradled in his arms. He said, “Hey, look what I found. There were cases of ammunition belts for it, too. The boys are bringing them up from the lake. Has the little shit talked yet, Captain Gringo?”
The American said, “No, he’s too brave for his own good. Put the gun here on the table. If I don’t strip it down and clean it with kerosene it’s going to rust.”
Sancho put the Maxim on the table and wiped his hands off on his pants. The American said, “I want this guy locked up somewhere. We’ll figure out what to do with him later.”
Hernando got to his feet with a self-satisfied smirk as the three of them went back outside. There were other guerrillas waiting for Sancho. Captain Gringo told two of them, “Lock him in Cyclops’ cabana and keep an eye on him.”
As they led the prisoner away, Sancho said, “Forgive me, señor, but you did not pick a very secure prison. If he were to tear a board or two away from a back wall—”
“I know. I saw it was a shack when I checked it out. Make sure nobody shoots him when he lights out tonight.”
“¡Nombre de Dios! You want him to get away, señor?”
“Sure. What the fuck would I want with him? I don’t like boys.”
“But Captain Gringo, if he gets away, he will head for his own base across the lake!”
“You said the magic words. Across the lake. Scared and on foot in unfriendly territory, it should take him a good week or so to get anywhere important.”
“But he knows where we are!”
“Shit, they’ve always known where we are! I didn’t tell him a thing they probably haven’t had a Marconi-gram about. Meanwhile, I got something out of him. He said other boats would come looking for the one we sank.”
“Of course they will, señor. That was hardly secret information.”
“The hell it wasn’t. If they’re going to have to look for the boat we sank, they don’t know where it is! They were stopping at each hacienda along the way to make arrests. Ergo, it could be a lot of places. We’ll get a work detail together and chop off all the wreckage that shows above the water. The lake’s too shallow to hide a sunken steamboat’s superstructure within a hundred yards or more of the shoreline. But if they don’t spot a mast or smokestack anywhere, they’ll think it went down somewhere further out.”
Sancho grinned and said, “Aha! You are a genius! But won’t they get around to asking questions along the shoreline, sooner or later?”
Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Yeah. I’d better clean the machine gun and get it back in working order.”
As he turned to go inside, he added, “You can let the women and children come back for now. But make sure everyone understands they may have to move again on sudden notice.”
“I understand, my captain. You think we are safe for the moment, no?”
“No, I just don’t see any point in being uncomfortable, while we wait for the next hand to be dealt.”
“You don’t know what’s going to happen next, señor?”
“People who mess in wars, thinking they know what’s going to happen next, get buried a lot, Sancho. A good soldier tries to keep alive a day at a time. You eat when you can and you screw and smoke what’s available. But you don’t drink too much, and you don’t ever plan the enemy’s next move for him. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. So you have to be ready for anything.”