The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (38 page)

A walkie-talkie crackled. “You there, sir?”

Ambo picked up the radio. “Talk to me.”

“Missed the
banzai,
sir,” a gruff voice said.

The radio hissed. “Come again?” Ambo said.

“Banzai,
sir. Dozen men in robes just went over the top. Suicide charge.”

“Survivors?”

“Negative, sir.”

Ambo and I exchanged glances.

“Casualties?” he asked.

“Two down, nothing serious. Shit.”

A loud popping noise in the background.

“What’s that?” Ambo shouted, fighting off the medic.

“Got one taking potshots at us, sir!”

“Is it a woman?” I asked. I grabbed the walkie-talkie from Ambo’s hand. “I said, is it a woman?”

There was a pause. “Affirmative. Sniper is female.”

“Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “Hold your fire!”

Another pause at the other end. “Those your orders, sir?”

Ambo held out his hand. I gave him the walkie-talkie. He said, “Hold your fire. Keep your head down and wait for us.” Ambo looked at me, eyelids drooping heavy over his eyes. “Repeat, hold your fire.”

The rocky four-wheel-drive track wound upward. We lurched along in the backseat. I turned to Ambo. “Something I have to ask you.”

“So ask.”

“I may not come down off the mountain.”

He shrugged. “In which case none of us will either.”

“That’s not what I mean. There’s something I need to know.”

Ambo waited.

I took a deep breath. “Lynn,” I said. “Was that on purpose?”

“Was what on purpose?”

“The whole thing. To seduce me.”

His face went blank. Motionless. “What do you mean?”

“Was that part of your plan?” I said. Still he didn’t answer. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Did you order her to sleep with me?”

He looked out the window at the volcano rising huge ahead of us. His lips moved several times before the word slid from his lips.

“No.”

We continued in silence.

The salt flats petered out, replaced by rocks piled high by ancient volcanic belches. In the distance a path zigzagged up the side of the volcano, the dusty trail pounded flat by decades of tourist traffic and, before that, centuries of human sacrifice, Incan priests leading their victims to the slaughter.

The road ended. We dismounted from the jeep. A soldier ran toward us stooped over. He wore camouflage with a Bolivian flag on the shoulder. The rest of the soldiers huddled behind car-sized boulders, their rifles aimed at an unseen enemy. Up the hill lay the scattered corpses of the brown-skinned, shaven-headed monks. Their robes fluttered in the cold breeze.

“They die long way from home Tibet,” Hak Po said. He spat.

A rifle shot rang out. The dust at my feet puffed in a cloud. “Get down!” the soldier shouted. We crouched low and ran for cover.

Ambo struggled to keep up. He rested against a man-sized boulder. Panted for breath. An American soldier wearing captain’s bars crouched at his feet.

“Who the hell is this guy?” I said. “American troops in Bolivia?”

“Military advisor,” Ambo said. He addressed the captain. “What have we got here?”

The advisor gave me an ugly look. “Single shooter, sir. Not a very good shot. Female. Dressed in black. Not like the others, sir.”

“She most certainly is not,” I said.

Ambo held out a hand. “Why did you attack?” he asked. “My orders were, I wanted them all alive.”

The American straightened, shoulder against the rock. He put his thumbs in his belt. Nodded his helmeted head in the brisk movement of a construction foreman. “Scattered across the hillside in sniper formation, sir. Very clever. Would have had to dig them out of their foxholes one by one.”

“So you attacked,” I said.

The captain ignored me. “Would have meant high casualties, sir. Decided to show them the chopper.”

Ambo said, “You didn’t.”

“It was a bluff. Those missiles look pretty scary, I guess. Instead of coming out with their hands in the air, they grouped together and did a suicide charge.”

“Except the woman.”

The man shrugged. “Except her. Funny thing, though. Didn’t scream. The monks, I mean. Just ran toward us silently. Not a sound.”

“Except for your gunfire as you shot them down,” I said.

Ambo stuck two fingers into the breast pocket of the captain’s fatigues, pulled out a pack of Hamiltons. He put a cigarette between his lips. The medic had confiscated his unfiltered Camels in the jeep. He glanced at the captain. “You mind?”

“For a living legend like yourself, sir?” The captain lit the cigarette with a plastic lighter. “They teach your exploits at Langley.”

Ambo took a puff, held it in his lungs, let it trickle out. He offered the pack to me. I waved it away. I expected suffering in my immediate future. I was probably going to die. I wanted to experience it raw and unadulterated. He handed the pack back to the captain.

“My fault,” Ambo said at last.

“How is it your fault?” I said. “Sounds to me like your overeducated grunt here fucked up.”

“He doesn’t know what’s at stake.”

“He knows how to follow orders, doesn’t he?”

The captain said to Ambo, “Sir, I got to put up with this? I don’t need a disciplinary problem on the line.”

Ambo dropped his hand on the captain’s shoulder, gripped the man’s flesh like a basketball, his thumb along the man’s collarbone. “Friend, this disciplinary problem, as you put it, is about to save the world. Isn’t that right, Horse?”

“Or destroy it,” I said.

Another shot rang out, and by instinct we ducked lower, even though we were fully protected by the boulder.

“Gimme your bullhorn,” Ambo said.

The captain held it out.

“It’s for him.” He jerked his head in my direction.

The captain held the bullhorn out to me grip first, with elaborate ceremony, as though it were a weapon. I took it. It sagged heavy in my hand.

“What do I say?” I asked Ambo.

Smoke swirled from his nose. “You want her to come out of this alive? Maybe you should tell her that.”

I swallowed. Tiptoed to the edge of the rock. Put the bullhorn to my lips. The sudden squawk made two nearby soldiers flinch away from me. Another bullet pocked the side of the boulder. I pointed the bullhorn at the sky.

“Kate!” my voice blared through the bullhorn. “It’s me!”

Three gunshots in succession smashed against the opposite face of the rock.

“It’s me!” I shouted again. “Horace! Horse! You know.” I felt like an idiot. “Me!”

The voice came clear, if faint, from several hundred meters up the mountain. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want you to die!” I shouted through the bullhorn. “Why don’t you come down here? We’ll talk about this!”

There was a long pause. I looked at Ambo. He looked at me. The captain put his hands on his hips and looked at both of us.

The voice floated down the mountain, the voice of heaven taunting those in hell. “Why don’t you come up here?”

Ambo pursed his lips. Shook his head. The captain raised his eyebrows.

“Ex-wife,” I said.

The captain whistled. “Were my ex-wife, I sure as hell wouldn’t go up there.”

A burning cigarette floated at my ear. Ambo leaned heavily on my shoulder. He smelled like smoke and antiseptic and old man. “Can’t let you go up there, son.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re our secret weapon. She kills you, we got nothing on Pitt. No one to talk to him.” He patted my shoulder. “Stakes are too high. You understand?”

He pointed his chin at the captain and lifted it an inch, and I knew that slight movement was as sure a death sentence for Kate as any judge and jury could provide. The captain spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to the Bolivian sergeant at his side. I couldn’t catch what was being said. But I could guess.

I vaulted a prostrate Bolivian soldier and ran up the hill.

“Goddammit!” the captain swore.

“Horace!” Ambo called out. “Horse, please!”

I clambered across the rocks. A long string of oaths followed me. “Fuck’s sake, man!” Ambo shouted. “Don’t you realize what you’re doing, what you’re risking?”

Where was Kate hiding? I headed uphill and toward the right, where it seemed I had last heard her voice.

“Come back, you asshole!” the captain cursed. “She’s going to kill you, can’t you see that?”

Another shot rang out. Something tugged at the skin on my left bicep. I reached up, found my hand covered in blood. I flexed the muscle. Just a graze. Another shot splintered a shard from a nearby boulder.

I stopped running, pulled my shirt out of my pants and lifted my sweater to expose my ribs, then rotated in a full circle, a fashion model exposing his unarmed navel to a freezing, high-altitude runway. I let my sweater drop and held up my hands, fingers spread wide, and walked toward the source of the gunshots.

“Don’t come any closer!”

I stopped. Her voice came from nearby. I scanned the rocks, looking for movement. She peeked from behind a boulder, her rifle pointed at me.

I took another step. “Let me come and talk.”

Bullets skittered and pinged off the rock I was standing on.

“I know how you feel!” I shouted.

“You know nothing how I feel!”

“I know because I feel the same.” The cry died in my throat, came out more like a moan.

“You always were a touchy-feeling bastard!”

There was a silence. I took another step.

“Please!” she shouted. “Tell me about your feelings!”

My hands out, arms high in the sky, Moses commanding the waters of her heart to part, I, the jury, delivered the verdict:

“Guilty!”

She withdrew behind the boulder. Long seconds passed. The frozen wind whipped through my sweater. I took another step.

I pounded my fists against my chest. “Guilty!” I shouted again. “I am scum!” My voice screeched high, verging on falsetto. “Scum! And you know what?” I shrieked at the rocks, not caring who heard. “I deserve to die! I do! Me!”

A sniffle. In the distance. I stepped forward. No response. Her sobbing grew louder. I put one foot in front of the other, climbing toward her.

Twenty meters.

Ten.

Five.

Her head popped up from behind the rock, her face red and inflamed, tears glinting on her cheeks. She pointed the rifle at my chest. “We all deserve to die.”

“Yes,” I said. “We do.”

“I mean all of us. The world. The human race. This infection that’s destroying Gaia.”

I shook my head. “It’s not their fault.”

“Isn’t it? You said so yourself.”

“I did. That’s true.”

She sniffled again. I doubted my ears at first. In all the time we’d been together I had never seen her cry. Not even at our loss. She had been dry, impossibly dry, unbelievably dry for a woman who’d just lost her child.

I took another step. She stopped me with a movement of the gun. “What changed your mind?” she asked.

I hesitated, but told the truth. “I didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

I let my shoulders droop and hung my head. “I am tired, Kate. I am so fucking tired.”

“Tired? Of what?” The outrage mounted in her throat. “Of grieving for our child?”

“Of everything,” I said.

She stood, exposing herself from waist up to the snipers below.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “Get down!”

“Fuck them,” she said. “And fuck you!” The rifle shook in her hands. “We are poison! Don’t you understand that?”

“You want to shoot me?” I said. “Go ahead.”

She sighted down the barrel at my heart. Her finger pulled back on the trigger. I closed my eyes, prepared for impact. I hoped her aim was better than the captain suggested. How long would it take to die? An abrupt thought: was there an afterlife? What if I was wrong? I discarded the notion but it lingered, an unwelcome fungus in the dark corners of my brain.

It happened so fast, I couldn’t believe there was no pain. A gunshot exploded in front of me. I patted my torso for wounds, but found none. A firecracker went off behind me, and I opened my eyes. Kate stood there with her mouth open. The gun dropped from her hands with a clatter, and she disappeared behind the boulder.

I ran to her. She lay draped across a rock, her back arched against the smooth stone, her face contemplating the sky. She gasped for breath. Clutched her black robe, now sticky and wet.

She lifted her eyes. “Horse.”

“Here, babe.” I squeezed her hand. Memories of the day she gave birth, her hand in mine. She hadn’t cried then either. Now her tears came in rivers, a lifetime’s supply demanding to be shed.

She said, “They killed me, Horace.”

“No,” I said, and stroked her hair. “You killed yourself.”

She looked up at me, her eyes so green, flickering as they studied mine. She touched my face, and I realized that my cheeks were dry. She smiled. Her lips fluttered. She laughed, went rigid with the pain.

“Don’t,” I said.

She looked at the sky. “Will we see each other again, do you think? Will we see,” and she coughed up blood, “will we see Lili?”

I clasped her hand to my chest. “Lili is gone,” I said, “and we have burned in hell for long enough.” I kissed her bare knuckles. “Go and find your peace.”

Her fingertips were icy rose petals on my cheek. Her hand quivered with the effort. “Peace,” she said. “I—”

But I will never know what she wanted to tell me. Her hand fell back and her body convulsed and the life went out of her, a rasping breath from deep inside her lungs, and she was still, a smile on her face, perhaps the first real smile she’d had in years.

And for the first time since our daughter died, I wept.

A man is not supposed to cry. A man should be hard, should endure, should be a rock, a stoic who soldiers on no matter what the cost.

But I was none of those things. I had never been. I never would be. I was a failure of a man.

As I looked down at her automatic rifle and wondered if my toe would reach, I felt a hand on my shoulder, lips on my cheek. Kate’s ghost brushed past me, a final peck on my wet cheek before beginning her eternal, unhappy wanderings. I jumped to my feet, slammed my shoulder into a headful of blonde hair.