The Viper Squad (19 page)

Lance had said, “I can’t spend another afternoon in this fucking hotel room or the lounge. Heat and sweat be damned, I’m going
outside.”

Joe had gone with him for lack of anything else to do. Harvey and Bob tailed along behind, only half mindful now of Campbell’s
regulation that they not form groups of more than two. They walked aimlessly and slowly along one of the downtown boulevards,
in the swelter and noise of the ultramodern city: Lance and Joe in front, Bob and Harvey lagging behind.

None of them heard the noisy little motorbike mount the sidewalk some way behind them. The little machine wove in and out
of the pedestrians, carrying two riders. The two members of the Clara Elizabeth Ramirez Metropolitan Commando targeted Lance
and agreed to take out Joe along with him. Two dead CIA agents were even better than one. They sped on their machine, uncaring
for other pedestrians now that they had zeroed in on the two they planned to snuff.

Pedestrians scampered out of the way of the noisy little bike. However, one pedestrian felt hot and belligerent and in no
mood for jumping out of the way for anyone. When Bob Murphy heard the exhaust of the motorbike behind him on the sidewalk,
he did not clear out of its way—only looked out of the corner of his eye and muttered a curse. The heat and humidity were
one thing; assholes on a motorbike who thought they could make him jump for his life were something he was not going to take.

As the bike and its two riders came alongside Bob, with its left handlebar brushing against him, Bob chopped backward with
his extended right arm. His arm caught the first rider across the throat and scraped him off the bike, along with the pillion
rider behind him.

A submachine gun clattered to the sidewalk from beneath the guayabera of the first rider. Bob immediately recognized it as
an M76, made by Smith & Wesson. Bob had seen it used by U.S. Navy SEAL teams in Vietnam and by various Special Forces and
Ranger units. He reached down and picked up the gun before its owner recovered. But the pillion rider saw him reach for it.

The pillion rider had not lost his grip on his weapon, a .22 automatic, with which he had intended to blow Lance away as he
had done Chips Stadnick and other enemies of proletarian freedom. He had fallen on his ass on the sidewalk as the bike went
from beneath him, and he now aimed his pistol at Bob before the stocky Australian could grab the M76 submachine gun.

He must have forgotten about Harvey Waller. Or not seen him, because anyone who had seen Harvey wasn’t likely to forget him.
Waller never instinctively shrank from sudden violence; his eyes never blinked in shock; his body never stayed rooted to the
spot. Instead, he was drawn to sudden and unexpected mayhem coldly and functionally, as a shark, detecting irregular pulses
and the taint of blood in water, becomes alert, calculating, fast, stony-eyed.

Harvey threw himself against the side of the sitting man and deflected his shot at Bob. Harvey clutched at the .22 automatic
in the man’s right hand but couldn’t reach it. Before his opponent could turn the pistol on him, Harvey twisted his hand into
the man’s face, his thumb found the cheekbone, then the hollow beneath the brow; from below and from its outer edge, he twisted
his thumb behind the eyeball and gouged out the left eye.

The glistening eyeball dropped out of the red, empty socket and hung on a thick white thread of optic nerve and a half dozen
ribbons of muscle. As the man screamed and twisted his head, his eyeball bounced against his cheek. He hardly noticed Harvey
wrench the gun from his hand.

Harvey’s cold frenzy was not sated. He touched the automatic to the bridge of the man’s nose and squeezed the
trigger. The man fell on his back on the sidewalk, and Harvey stared at the scorched hole he had drilled in the still face
with the empty eye socket.

Then he twisted on the other rider, who was on his hands and knees fearfully watching Bob take possession of his submachine
gun. Harvey tried to put a bullet in each of his eyes. He hated fear. He only
disliked
people’s eyes… unless they contained fear. He missed with his first shot—it was at least two inches too high, and the bullet
sank through the bone of the forehead. His second shot was fired as the head was jerked back from the impact of the first
bullet, with the result that the point of entry was much too low, completely missing the eye and hitting the middle of the
cheek.

“Get down fast!” Bob hissed.

They both hit the pavement and wriggled for cover. Bob had seen nothing—he was just responding to the situation as he had
been trained.

Lance Hardwick and Joe Nolan had looked behind them when they heard the riderless motorbike scrape against a parked car and
fall on its side, engine still kicking and rear wheel spinning. They didn’t hear the sound of the shot that Harvey deflected,
but they saw him attack the man and shoot his companion. Next, they saw Bob and Harvey flatten themselves on the pavement
and crawl for cover a few milliseconds before a wave of automatic fire ripped over them from the palm trees and bushes on
the center strip of the boulevard. Lance and Joe dived for cover themselves.

Bob Murphy gripped the M76 submachine gun by the barrel shroud with his left hand. His right hand set the selector switch
on full auto and then retracted the cocking handle along its track into the cocked position. He fired a trial shot into the
bushes, but lost three shots because the trigger was heavy and the gun’s cyclic rate too high.

“Harvey, check if he had any spare magazines.”

Harvey moved, crablike, back to the body and drew a
hail of fire from the bushes on the center strip. Bob pinpointed the source and delivered a short burst of 9 mm parabellum
slugs. The bushes heaved, and a body pitched forward into the roadway and lay still.

One car accelerated past, but the other traffic in each direction had braked to a halt fifty yards or so short of the firing
zone. The drivers left their cars and crouched behind them to see what was going on. Those caught in the choked traffic behind
blew their horns in mounting frustration at the inexplicable holdup.

Pedestrians had melted away. A few stood in distant doorways, but the recently crowded sidewalks on both sides of the boulevard
had emptied except for the combatants.

Harvey found one spare magazine for the M76 submachine gun, and on the second body he found two for his pistol. As soon as
Bob saw he had a second magazine with another thirty-six shells, he strafed the bushes in the center strip of the boulevard.
He dropped one, gunman; but another, behind the trunk of a palm tree, escaped his fire, delivered a withering burst at him
and retreated to the far sidewalk of the boulevard under cover of friendly fire.

Bob changed magazines. He yelled to Harvey, “I see three of them over there.”

Harvey looked disgustedly at the low-caliber pistol in his hand. They heard Lance shout.

Lance went first, then Joe, zigzagging across the road to the center strip. They drew automatic fire from the three guns on
the far sidewalk. Lance took an M76 from one of the men Bob had shot. He threw a spare magazine back across the road to Bob,
then another. Ice got himself an M16 assault rifle from the other body.

The firelight raged across the boulevard. The mercs had the advantage now, holding the center strip as well as one half of
the boulevard, effectively cutting off their three adversaries and pinning them down behind parked cars.

The leftists, realizing they now were in a losing position,
tried to move east from car to car in order to make a getaway.

“Let them go!” Bob shouted.

Neither Joe nor Lance heard him as their weapons rattled lead. Lance crippled one man by catching him in an ankle, and then
finished him off with a burst to the chest before he could reach the shelter of a car.

“Let them go!” Bob yelled over and over till, finally, in a lull in the firing, they heard him. “Hold your fire! Let them
go!”

The two survivors made off eastward along the far side of the boulevard, leaving their dead behind them.

“Follow me,” Bob shouted. “Let’s get the hell outta here! We can’t afford to get arrested any more than they can!”

Joe had to pull Lance by the shoulder, and Harvey too was unwilling to leave, feeling cheated by not having had much of a
part in the major firefight, owing to the small caliber of his pistol. The four men kept their weapons and ran from the area
cleared by combat to mix in with the crowds of onlookers and stalled traffic. Before they could reach the crowds, armed members
of various security forces suddenly swarmed out to meet them—National Police, Treasury Police, National Guard, Customs Police
and some other uniforms they did not recognize. Enough automatic weapons were trained on them to chop them into goldfish food.

Bob Murphy threw his M76 to the ground and raised his hands. He looked at the others, but Joe and Lance had already been convinced
by this Spanish armada and were dropping their guns. Only Harvey, with his useless short—range .22 automatic pistol, seemed
unwilling to put down his gun. He finally let it fall.

“Thank you very much, Harvey,” Bob breathed gratefully. “You just saved all our lives with that one small act of kindness.”

“I ain’t no fuckin’ coward,” Harvey muttered. “If I had a submachine gun, they’d never take me alive.”

A Treasury Police sergeant yelled at them both in Spanish. Lance talked to him, and he did some yelling at Lance.

“I told him you don’t speak the lingo,” Lance explained to the others. “He said we’re not to talk among ourselves. From now
on he’ll give me orders and you follow me.”

Bob was about to say something witty, but changed his mind because of the look on the sergeant’s face. They stood there silent
and without moving while several members of the different security forces argued with each other. Meanwhile, the bodies lay
untended and the traffic was still halted in both directions by police just standing in the roadway, doing nothing. They saw
one driver, who kept impatiently honking his horn at them, led away in handcuffs. The members of the different security forces
were becoming angrier at one another in their argument.

“They’re fighting over who takes us prisoner,” Lance explained in an undertone. “My bet is on the Treasury Police.”

His bet won. They were escorted at gunpoint to a police van and pushed inside its steel doors. They sat on metal benches facing
each other and waited, along with their guards.

One of the policemen pointed at two men being led to the van at gunpoint. “Your enemies,” he told Lance.

The two men and more policemen climbed into the back of the van, and the doors were slammed behind them. The police all seemed
to know the two prisoners they had brought in last and jeered at them in a seemingly friendly way, calling one by the name
of “Ricardo.” The two prisoners remained silent and sullen. No one said anything to the four mercs. After the van had traveled
for about ten minutes, it slowed to a stop. The policemen opened the rear doors and pushed the two Salvadoran prisoners outside.
The two men stayed where they were, one sitting in the
roadway and the other standing next to the van doors and trying to get back in. One policeman booted him in the chest as
the van moved forward.

Two of the cops in the van poked their M16s through the open rear doors and mowed down the two men from a distance of about
ten yards. The van continued moving and the police shut the rear doors. The cop next to Lance said something.

Lance translated it for the others. “They were trying to escape.”

J
OE
Nolan sat on a wooden kitchen chair in an otherwise empty room, eight by ten, brown-yellow walls, tiled floor, light fixture
behind a cage in a very high ceiling, no window, steel door, a peephole two-thirds of the way up the door. Silence.

He had stuck to his story. He was an American tourist. He knew the other three: they stayed at the same hotel. He had broken
no law, only defended himself in a vicious attack. As an American citizen, he expected a quick release. No, he had no complaints
to make about his treatment by the Treasury Police.

Joe had sat in a cell often enough before to know how to keep still and wait for events to take their course. He sure as hell
was not looking for a way to attempt an escape.

As always when engaging the enemy, Comandante Clarinero had set up the six companies of his brigade as watertight units—two
assault companies, one reinforcement, one communications, one watchdog and one supply. Normally the two assault companies
carried out the mission, with the reinforcement company as a backup. The watch-dog
company sealed off access roads, set up antiaircraft defense, created diversionary tactics or whatever the circumstances
demanded. Watchdog was often aided in this by the communications company, who also kept lines of supply and retreat open and
generally did everything it was no one else’s job to do. The supply company’s responsibility was ammunition, weapons, drinking
water, food and equipment. In a regular army the assault companies would be the elite group and attract the best fighting
men, but this was not so in Clarinero’s brigade, because with an army of irregulars fighting a guerrilla war, the focus of
combat rarely occurred where it was planned. Any of the companies could find itself spearheading the attack or bearing the
chief brunt of an assault. In fact, the supply company was regarded as being the most dangerous to be a member of, since it
was less mobile than the others.

Paulo Esteban and two other Cuban advisors were with the communications company. They watched the air shimmer over the broad
Lempa river in the heat of early afternoon. The twenty-eight Salvadorans in the company set about their tasks, keeping to
the cover of the under—growth at the river’s edge. At this point the Lempa ran roughly north-to-south, from the border with
Honduras into the Pacific, dividing off the eastern third of El Salvador from the rest of the country. Guerrilla strategy
was to blow the bridges and keep them down, crippling the movements of government troops and sealing off the eastern provinces.