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.”