The Viper Squad (10 page)

“I’m sorry,” Sally said. “Is that when you became a guerrilla?”

“Not at first. I was too afraid. But in a while, my anger grew. Now I’m a freedom fighter.” She looked at Sally sympathetically.
“That’s why I understand what you are going through now. At first you feel powerless, helpless, think there’s nothing you
can do. But that changes.”

So that’s what you aim to do, Sally thought, turn me into a guerrilla fighter. I may be dumb, but I’m not that much of a turkey.

Poynings came to lunch the day after Mike Campbell and Andre Verdoux arrived at Bob and Eunice Murphy’s large house in Vermont.
They sat at a long mahogany table with a silver service, cut-glass goblets and sprays of flowers in vases. Eunice had assumed,
for no particular reason, that a formal lunch would be the best way for all of them to get reacquainted and to meet Poynings.
It was a disaster. Andre complained about the sauce on the lamb. Bob called Andre an asshole. Dwight tried to make peace between
the two and got insulted by both. Mike talked with Eunice, who believed him to be an avid bird-watcher or, as she said, ornithologist.
Mike knew only three birds—sparrow, roadrunner and hawk, not counting seagulls—but since Eunice knew even fewer, they got
along quite well.

In spite of their seeming lack of interest and Bob’s rude interruptions, Dwight Poynings persisted till he got his story told,
relating everything he knew, including the State Department’s attitude to him and also Chips Stadnick’s death, who had been
described in his obituaries as a journalist. By the time coffee was served, Dwight looked gloomy and had obviously decided
that things were not going to work out for him with Campbell & Co.

“You have a million to spare?” Mike asked him casually.

Dwight blinked. “I don’t toss my money around any old how, Mr. Campbell. Although it’s not a widely known
fact, holding onto one’s money once one has got it can be just as difficult as earning it in the first place.”

Mike patiently rephrased his question. “Are you willing to spend a million to get your daughter back?”

Dwight thought about that. “Yes.”

“I pay the team members a share of one hundred thou each, win or lose,” Mike explained. “I take two shares. The rest goes
on expenses. Might run you more than a million.”

Dwight nodded his agreement.

“Bob doesn’t need his hundred thousand,” Eunice put in brightly. “He’ll do it for friendship’s sake, won’t you, Bob?”

“No, he won’t, Eunice,” Mike said firmly. “I make the rules, and those rules say Bob gets his share and holds onto it. No
givebacks. Clear?”

“Absolutely.” Dwight said.

Bob said with an evil smile, “Hell, the whole lot of us ain’t costing Dwight what a medium-good pitcher would demand for a
season on his baseball team.”

“Yes, but that’s an investment,” Dwight replied. “I’d earn it all back and more in ticket sales.”

“You trying to say your daughter Sally isn’t a good investment?” Bob needled.

“That’s a low blow, Bob. But I suppose I do look upon my children as emotional investments, and I could say that Sally has
not been a good emotional investment.”

“You put your money in and expect affection back?” Bob continued to goad him.

“Bob, please stop,” Eunice pleaded.

“Eunice, thank you, but I’m capable of taking care of myself,” Dwight put in. “Whatever inadequacies I may or may not have
as a father hardly concern you gentlemen as a paramilitary group.”

Mike handed him a piece of paper. “That’s the account number and bank, in Georgetown on Grand Cayman, where you deposit the
money. We’ll need recent photos of
your daughter, a signed statement from you authorizing us to rescue her and anything else at all that you think might help
us. The most important thing you can do is maintain secrecy about having contacted us.”

“You mean to say you’ll definitely go?” Dwight asked, delighted.

“Bob and I will go, but that’s the only guarantee I can offer. The odds will be against us.”

Andre was aware he had not been included. He sipped his coffee reflectively. As if his mind were still on the food, he said,
“Bob, by any chance was that awful sauce on the lamb one of your Australian specialties?”

After almost a week at the guerrilla camp, Gabriela woke Sally Poynings one morning before dawn.

“We have to move out at first light,” Gabriela said. “Get yourself ready.”

“But where are we going?” Sally asked, rubbing her eyes.

“I don’t know. Somewhere more secure.”

“I’m not sure I want to go,” Sally announced.

Sally had said nothing yet to Gabriela of her feelings that things were not working out as she had hoped. After a11, she had
come to find the truth, to find answers. She had now decided there were no answers to be found living in a tent on the pine-covered
slope of a mountain. The sound of car horns on the Boulevard de los Heroes would be sweet music in her ears at this moment.

“I think I’ll stay on here another day or so,” Sally said, “then take a trip into San Salvador and see how that feels.”

Gabriela looked at her for a moment and then went away without a word.

Sally was returning to the tent after having washed her face when Gabriela came back with Antonio.

“Senorita Sarah Quincy Poynings,” he said in the very formal tones he used when irritated—calling her by her
correct name Sarah, which she hated, “when you are in a military camp you obey orders, unless you are in a position to give
them.”

“I feel like a couple of days in the city, Antonio,” Sally said. “Have some hot tamales from a street stall. Spend fifteen
minutes in a hotel shower. Then I’d like to try the coastline you guys hold in the province of La Union or Usulutan. I mean,
why be a rebel in the mountains when you can be one on the beach?”

Antonio gave her that sarcastic smile she remembered from the time he had made her leave some of her favorite clothes behind
in that suitcase in the valley. He asked, “Should I phone ahead to make reservations for you and make sure they take American
Express?”

“Don’t be mean, Antonio,” Sally said. “What’s the problem?”

“We have io problem, senorita. We have orders. You move out this morning.”

“Are you coming too?”

“No.” Antonio’s coldness melted. “I would like to, Sally, but I can’t.”

“And Gabriela?”

“If you want her to go with you, she will go.”

“Yes,” Sally said without hesitation. “All right, Gabriela?”

“I’d like to, Sally.”

Sally noticed the momentary glance exchanged between them. If Sally wasn’t exactly their prisoner, certainly Gabriela was
some kind of guard over her. But Sally was used to that, and she felt safe with Gabriela around and liked her as a person.

“Better get your coffee and have something to eat, Sally,” Antonio said. “You leave in thirty minutes.”

As she watched him walk away, Sally regretted not having had a chance to talk with him more over the past days. He was always
so busy, and she knew that he had deliberately kept away from her so as not to become distracted from his rebel activities.

She, Gabriela and two men force-marched through the mountain forests nearly all day till they reached another camp. They left
that at dawn the following day, with eight new recruits. At the end of three days’ constant trekking through the mountains,
they had collected twenty-seven recruits along the way and were told that next day they would reach the camp of the legendary
Comandante Clarinero.

Sally was excited. Here at last was the real thing! The big time! Comandante Clarinero was the Robin Hood of the guerrillas.
He swooped down on government forces, captured them and sent them home gunless to their mothers or wives and children with
a stem warning to find a better line of work in the future. He announced raises for workers on the coffee fincas; and the
big landowners had no choice but to pay them, even when they had government troops on their land. Comandante Clarinero talked
to the
New York Times
and CBS News and so forth on a regular basis. He was banned from her father’s chain of TV stations. Now Sally would get to
meet him in person! Things were definitely looking up.

They reached the camp about noon, and everyone but Sally spent the next three hottest hours of the day resting in the shade
of the forest pines. She pestered many of the comandante’s guerrillas with conversation and explored the camp. People began
to move about again when the heat abated a little. She heard Gabriela calling her name.

“The comandante wants to talk with you,” Gabriela said.

Sally already knew that the biggest tent in the camp was the comandante’s office, but that he slept in a small tent too, like
everyone else. She had steered clear of his office till now, when she followed Gabriela toward it.

Four men sat behind a folding table under a canopy near the large tent, like judges at a bench. One had thick folders stacked
before him on the table, and although he clearly modeled his appearance on that of Pancho Villa, he looked
more like a harassed schoolteacher who has just realized he is now going to have to read all these homework projects. He
was handsome and young, and Sally’s heart skipped a beat as he was introduced to her as Comandante Clarinero. Only one of
the other three men made an impression on her. He was a brutal, powerful man with piercing eyes with a large cigar in his
mouth and a big revolver on the table in front of him. His name was Paulo Esteban, and she could tell by his accent he was
not Salvadoran. Gabriela told her later that this Cuban had been picked personally by Fidel Castro as his advisor to the comandante.

Sally told her story in great detail. They seemed less interested in her than in Bennett’s films and how he knew Bermudez.
To her surprise, they never questioned her motivations. Was she of such little importance it didn’t matter why she had come?
Her annoyance at this was overcome by her awareness that she still could not have given them a clear answer if they had asked.
But they didn’t.

“Is that all?” she said to Gabriela as the two women left.

“I suppose so.”

“But don’t they need to know about my political stance and life-style and—”

“No,” Gabriela said shortly. “All they need to know is which side you’re on. We’re all here for our own reasons. After we
win and take power, maybe then we’ll see what differences lie among us.”

“That’s when the communists will squeeze out the moderates and socialists in order to grab power for the party,” Sally observed
acidly.

Gabriela smiled. “It often seems to turn out that way.” Sally welcomed the quick descent of night because she was exhausted
after her three-day trek and had taken no rest during the hot part of the day. She and Gabriel had been assigned a tent, and
she was just about to creep into it
when she heard the notes of a trumpet playing a strange and mournful tune. She sat outside the tent awhile and listened to
old-fashioned dance measures and marches with all sorts of decorative trills that might have sounded very ordinary played
by a full brass band but which had an eerie quality played on a solitary horn at dusk in a mountain forest.

Sally walked toward the sound. She saw the handsome young comandante sitting alone on a rock playing a battered silver cornet.
The cornet’s notes were softer, more buttery, than the sharp, sweet notes of a trumpet. She sat at a distance, watching and
listening to the melancholy old airs until it was completely dark. At the end of one tune, the comandante got to his feet
without warning and walked back toward the tents.

Sally almost called after him, aware that he had not seen her there listening to him. But she did not. She made her way slowly
back to her tent in the darkness, her head full of sensual brass glissandos and diminuendos, knowing she would dream about
the comandante.

Early the next morning, the comandante led his men from the camp on a series of raids. Apart from Sally and Gabriela, only
thirteen were left behind in the camp, and these were some of the recruits who had arrived with them. Gabriela was placed
in charge.

A few hours after the others had departed, Sally heard shouting as she walked with Gabriela among the tents beneath the pines.
This camp was much more extensive than the others she had seen, but the cover offered by the pines here was not so good as
at the first camp in which she had stayed. The trees were bigger here but more thinly spread on the ground. The men shouting
were pointing up at the sky, a calm and peaceful blue in gaps in the branches overhead.

“Push-pull! Push-pull!”

“Stay still!” Gabriela yelled at the men who were running about and shouting.

The big automatic pistol appeared in her left hand and she fired two shots over their heads. That stopped them.

“Don’t move from where you are!” Gabriela ordered. “Next man who moves, I shoot him!”

No one moved.

Gabriela muttered to Sally beside her, “Damn raw recruits. Where do they come from? They should know better.”

Sally didn’t have time to dwell on Gabriela’s sudden transformation, as the Salvadoran woman’s voice was drowned out by the
roar of an aircraft flying low overhead.

Gabriela shouted to Sally above the noise, “See the propellers both fore and aft on the engine mounts? That’s why we call
the plane a push-pull. It’s an 0-2, an observation craft you Americans give to the Salvadoran air force. They often work with
A-37s.”

Sally did not ask what an A-37 was. The recruits had stopped panicking and were looking a bit shamefaced. Gabriela put away
her big pistol.

“They must have seen something,” she announced in a loud voice. She pointed. “Shout to those men over there to keep still.
That plane will make a repeat pass.”

Sally looked around. Earth had been thrown on the fire the previous night—no smoke rose from it. The tents were green, and
everything else was either green also or camouflaged. She had already been told that any brightly colored object that stood
out from its background—even an object as small as the notebook with a bright red cover that one recruit was carrying at the
time—could be seen quite easily from the air, particularly if it was moving. Sally ran an anxious eye over everything, ironically
aware of how she was slipping into the role of a guerrilla and learning survival tactics.