Cobra Strike (14 page)

Bryce pointed to a neat pile of cut logs. “They brought these in since we were here yesterday.’ He ambled over to six oil
drums standing upright, their tops covered with burlap held down by lengths of board. He lifted one burlap cover, ran his
finger through the mash, and tasted it. “Ready to run,” he pronounced. “I reckon those boys are going to be along here today.”

“Maybe they’re still recovering from last night and are a bit late in starting,” Crockett responded. “You want to wait?”

“Do no harm. If they ain’t here in a couple of hours, they ain’t coming.”

Bob Murphy had done enough walking and hoped the bootleggers would show so they wouldn’t have to trek back all the way through
those woods again. Murphy dipped his finger into the dark clear liquid and tasted it. It was sour and tangy. Dust and dead
insects floated on its top.

“Sometimes you’ll find a rat or a coon drowned in it,” Bryce told him as he tasted the mash in the other five oil drums. “Two
of these barrels are ready to run. The others are still sweet and sticky with scum on top—they’ll be a few days yet. It takes
the mash longer while it’s still not too hot. In summer it could be ready in three days.” He carefully replaced the burlap
and boards. “This stuff ain’t too bad, as white liquor goes in these parts. In each of these fifty-five-gallon drums there’s,
say, fifty gallons of mash, which is probably about forty-five pounds of cornmeal, thirty pounds of sugar, two pounds of malt,
and a one-pound cake of yeast. The rest is water. Depending on a lot of things, including the skill of the moonshiner, out
of fifty gallons of mash he could get five to ten gallons of whiskey.”

Crockett had been foraging around and came back with a pint bottle of clear liquid. “I found this hid in the bushes yonder.”
He shook the bottle vigorously, and both he and Bryce looked closely at the bubbles on the surface. “About a hundred and ten
proof, I’d say,” and Bryce nodded his agreement.

For liquor of a hundred proof, the bubbles would sit exactly half in and half out of the liquid. For weaker liquor, the bubbles
rode higher; for stronger liquor, lower.

Bryce took the bottle and sniffed it. “Most white liquor comes in at a hundred proof, even if the bootlegger has to add rubbing
alcohol or paint thinner to get it there. Another thing they add is beading oil, which makes the bead or bubble sit just right,
like it was a hundred proof. Don’t seem like anything’s added to this stuff, though, not by the smell of it.”

Murphy knew Bryce Cummings had not tasted liquor in many years, and he noticed that Crockett was not tasting it,
either. So he took the bottle and swallowed a generous mouthful. He immediately felt the jolt of the fiery liquid.

“I bet this baby packs some hangover,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s the impurities in the alcohol more than the alcohol itself that gives you the hangover,” Bryce explained. “Wood
alcohol breaks down in the body partly into formic acid, which ants use to sting. You better stick to your expensive aged
whiskey, Bob. At least it has a lot of the poisons leached out of it.” He walked toward the bushes at one side of the clearing.
“Maybe we better quiet down some. Those boys is likely to come along any minute.”

All three of them were big men and, none too comfortable, crouched down in the bushes, along with mosquitoes, deerflies, and
assorted other bugs to keep them close company. They stayed put for more than an hour before they heard voices coming down
the path. Four men walked into the clearing, each toting a fifty-pound bag of sugar on his back. That was all the evidence
the two revenuers needed against them. Both men sprang out of the bushes at the two nearest them, knocking them down and walloping
the hell out of them, as well as taking some powerful counter blows themselves. This left Bob Murphy to handle the other two
moonshiners. At this moment it was clear that Bryce no longer expected him to behave as an uninvolved observer.

Neither of them had seen Murphy yet in his hiding place. The nearest one to him dropped the sugar sack he was carrying and
tried to jump in to help his buddy struggling with Crockett on the ground. Before he managed to lay a fist on the county revenuer,
Murphy burst out of the bushes like a tiger. His roar scared this moonshiner, and his right boot did a lot worse. It caught
the man in the ribs, snapping a few of them like chicken bones. He was already sinking to the ground when Murphy’s left fist
hammered into his right cheekbone. All he could see were bright patterns before his eyes and feel the sharp pain as he went
down and instinctively curled to protect himself from further blows.

None were coming. Murphy was too busy handling the fourth man, who dropped his sack and drew a hunting knife with a six-inch
blade. Murphy was kind of relieved to see that it wasn’t a pistol, though he had a lot of respect for any
kind of knife. The man made a running lunge at him, and Murphy backed away so fast, he fell over a bag of sugar. Before the
blade could reach him as he lay on the ground, his big hands grabbed the fifty-pound bag and held it out on his long powerful
arms. He felt a blade thrust penetrate the tightly packed paper sack and climbed to his feet propelling the sugar sack forward
and keeping it between him and the knife-wielding moonshiner. Then he heaved the heavy sack, and it took down his adversary
with it, flattening him on his back beneath it. Bob gave him a swift kick in the nuts, which made him drop the knife and lose
the will to fight.

Bryce and Crockett handcuffed all four together and got busy busting up the still, turning over the vats of mash, smashing
the pump head, and throwing stuff down the well shaft. Murphy felt a bit sorry for the four bootleggers, handcuffed and bruised,
watching their equipment being smashed by a pair of experts, so he found the pint bottle of white liquor and offered it to
them.

One shook his head in disdain. “We make that shit to sell, not to drink. You’ll find a new bottle of Wild Turkey in our truck
back along the path. We’d sure appreciate that.”

But Bryce put his foot down about that. Crockett said the bottle
and
the truck were now state property. He told Murphy that since he had never seen these fellas before, he didn’t want to go
encouraging them to stay in
his
county by treating them too soft.

After leaving Don Crockett and the four bootleggers at the courthouse, they took the seized truck around to fetch Bryce’s
station wagon, returned the truck to the courthouse, and then headed back to the yacht at Hilton Head.

“You see the amount of work goes into this job?” Bryce demanded to know on the way.

Bob said that he did.

“You ready to come out again tomorrow? I’m going to help a county man over in Allendale County.”

“Sure, I will, but only if you come aboard and talk with the god-awful folks coming aboard this afternoon.”

Bryce was agreeable until he got to the dock and saw the socialites chattering on the rear deck. “I ain’t going to be
able to go through with this, Bob,” he said in a sorrowful voice.

“You ain’t got no backbone, Bryce.” “Not for that kind of stuff, I don’t.” “See you next time I’m passing through.” Bryce
waved and yelled, “Thanks for your help.” Eunice hustled him down to their stateroom to change into something suitable. “You
had a call from Andre Verdoux.” Eunice had met Andre and knew what the call probably meant. “I’m going to miss you while you’re
gone.” She sighed. “But at least since you will be away for a while, you have no excuse now not to be nice to the guests.
And I’m afraid they’re a dreary lot.”

They both laughed and kissed.

Baker, Winston, and Turner sat silently on the hillside sipping tea with Gul Daoud. The three Americans had previously agreed
on what they had to do. This time they would not let Gul Daoud dissuade them as he had done before. As usual, Baker was their
spokesman.

“Having us here with you is costing you too much, Gul,” Baker said.

“Without you we could not have destroyed the jet runway,” Gul replied graciously. “With jets landing there we would have even
more Russians everywhere than we have now.”

This was hard to credit. At present all the mountain passes to the east and south had been sealed. Soviet and government troops
were conducting sweeps over suitable terrain and house-to-house searches of villages. Where the terrain was too rough and
rock cover too heavy to make ground sweeps feasible, helicopter gunships patroled and single-engine observation planes flew
along planned coordinates.

“If we three leave this area,” Baker said, “and show up somewhere else, it will take the heat off you. They’re so damn anxious
to catch us alive, they’ll forget about their revenge for the men you killed and choppers you destroyed. And it’s not just
your fighting force we have to consider. Practically every man, woman, and child in this region has
been made to suffer in some way because the Russians know we’re still hiding here. Once we go, they’ll follow.”

Gul Daoud shook his head. “I could never allow you to give yourselves up to ease the pressure on us. Never.”

“We’re not giving ourselves up,” Baker argued. “Give us an escort of armed men and we’ll lead the communist forces away from
you. It’s a military tactic; look on it that way.”

They finally prevailed by promising the rebel leader that they would come back again.

“I know you will,” Gul said with a sly smile, “because there are not many other places you can go.”

Two days walk from Gul Daoud’s territory, they and their four-man Afghan escort came across a small army outpost of government
soldiers. It reminded the Americans of a miniature version of a French Foreign Legion post in an old movie. It was only a
single-story flat-roofed building surrounded quite closely by a twelve-foot-high wall with miniature towers at each of the
four corners. Slits in the towers’ curved walls allowed the occupants to fire outside, and a walkway ran inside the wall near
the top so that those inside could stand behind it and fire over its edge. A heavy wood door protected the entrance. Considering
that it all seemed to be built of sun-dried mud, it was an impressive structure. At most, a dozen soldiers could be stationed
there.

The four Afghans had not brought them here by accident. They seemed to know all about the outpost. All seven of them remained
most of the day observing the place from an outcrop of rocks a quarter of a mile away. Through what they saw they were able
to interpret what the rebels had been trying to tell them, and they couldn’t understand, Baker being unable this time to make
head or tail of their hand signs and facial expressions. They saw that the officer of the outpost had established himself,
probably against regulations, in a small private house a few hundred yards from the outpost and at the edge of a small village.
No doubt he was eating better food here than his men at the outpost, and perhaps he had even arranged for some other comforts
to ease the loneliness and rigors of a military life. The men, about nine in all, and the officer continually went back
and forth between the house and the outpost. It was obvious that discipline was slack and none of them felt much threatened.

All that was really necessary was that the three Americans let themselves be seen by some of these government soldiers. But
plainly the four rebels with them had higher hopes, and even Turner, with all his responsibility for Baker’s and Winston’s
safety, found it hard to pass by this sitting duck.

Turner and Winston sneaked down to the house with two of the rebels after dark. Through a lighted window they saw the officer
squatting on the floor, eating with his fingers and being waited on by three women. The back door had been left ajar, and
all four men eased their way into the kitchen at the back of the house and from there into the room in which the officer was
eating. His mouth stopped chewing when he saw the four AK-47 barrels pointing at him by lamplight. The three women were terrified
but knew better than to scream. Winston and Turner herded them into the kitchen and spoke soothingly to them in English. They
would make good witnesses that the Yanks had been here.

In the kitchen they heard hammering in the front of the house. Turner went to investigate. The two rebels had driven a nail
into the wood crosspiece above the front door and were now stringing up the officer from it on a short length of rope. Gagged
by a cloth stuck in his mouth, with his thumbs tied behind his back, all the officer could do was kick desperately against
the wood door in his last moments of life. Then he hung limply, swaying and revolving at the end of the rope, his toes almost
touching the floor and his nose almost touching the closed door.

A soldier at the outpost may have heard the kicks on the door, anyway, he was soon outside shouting. When he tried to push
the door inward, something unseen prevented it from opening. The soldier heaved it inward, and his hanged officer banged into
him face-to-face. A second later the soldier was hauled inside and knifed deeply in the chest. He was left to die on the floor,
gasping, convulsing, choking on his blood.

After a while, when the soldier did not come back, a
floodlight came on atop one of outpost’s corner towers. Three men emerged from the big wooden entrance gate and headed for
the house. Baker and the other two rebels were hidden nearby but saw no opportunity to get inside the little fort. The three
men approached the house cautiously, yet remained in full view in the floodlight. The two rebels inside the house became agitated.
Winston and Turner nodded to them, and they opened fire with their AK-47s, taking down all three government solders in a single
burst.

Baker and the others joined them behind the late officer’s house. He said, “Forget the outpost. There’s maybe five guys in
it, but they could hold out against us for a week. And you can bet they’ve already radioed for help. I’m starving. You think
there’s anything to eat in this burg?”

Guns at the ready, they walked down the village street. The people stared at them with curiosity and seemed careful to show
no support for them. All the same, they showed no hostility, either. They helped themselves to lamb kebabs still on the skewers.
When Turner tried to leave Pakistani rupees as payment, the man shook his head, genuinely frightened at such proof that he
aided the Americans. He did accept gladly several handsful of AK-47 rounds. Then he whispered something about Allah, which
the four rebels whispered back to him.