The Viper Squad (21 page)

Even Sally laughed. “I never thought that what you said would really work. I guess you must really know what you are doing!”

Clarinero looked genuinely flattered at this compliment from her.

They met the other bus outside the barracks on the town square.

“Drive in,” Clarinero ordered his driver.

The driver began to ease the front of the bus between two stone pillars, when an unarmed uniformed soldier tried to close
the large wooden doors against it. The fender of the bus hit one of the doors.

“Idiot!” the soldier howled and shook his fist at the driver. “You scraped the paint on the door. When the captain sees this,
I’m going to tell him who did it, you old fool!”

“Let us in or we’ll wreck your door,” Clarinero called.

The soldier peered carefully into the bus for the first time, looked horrified at all the armed men inside it and took to
his heels. The guerrillas laughed, and the bus drove into the enclosed courtyard of the barracks, followed by the second one.

“No shooting!” Clarinero ordered his men as they poured from the front and rear exits to take cover.

This was when the BBC TV camera crew arrived in two taxis. They got nice shots of the fourteen government soldiers left to
guard the barracks being sent home unharmed by the guerrillas, and of course they took all the footage they could get of the
pretty blond guerrilla with the M16. Her identity was later supplied to them by a Cuban contact. Clarinero seized weapons
and ammunition. Before he and his men retreated from the town, they blew up the barracks and set fire to a coffee warehouse—which
pleased the cameramen.

As Clarinero had promised Sally, no one was hurt.

“I’m an American, and you filthy goddam yellabellies had better not try to paw me about!” Harvey Waller looked down at the
Treasury cop he had just decked.

The man lay on the tiled floor of the windowless room into which they had locked Harvey at Treasury Police headquarters. The
cop’s lower lip was split and blood trickled down his chin.

“Get up before I boot ya in the kisser,” Harvey snarled.

The cop jumped to his feet real quick and assumed a karate stance.

“I couldn’t give a shit for that furrin’ nancy-boy prancin’ you go on with,” Harvey told him and belted him in the left eye.

The policeman had raised his forearm to ward off the blow, as his training in the martial arts had taught him, but Harvey’s
big hammer fist came through all the same, made an arcade game out of his brain and crumpled him in a corner of the room.

As the cop lay there gasping and moaning, Harvey toed him in the belly, just to let him know he was getting irritated.

“Pity I still need you in working order,” Harvey told
him, “or I could really have a little fun with you. On your feet, punk.”

The policeman climbed unsteadily to his feet, no karate stance this time.

Harvey pointed. “You got the key to that door?”

“No key, senor.”

“You got a gun?”

“No gun, senor.”

“You telling me the truth, motherfucker? If I find one on you, I’ll tear your head off your shoulders.”

The cop’s voice rose in anger. “If I had a gun, I would have killed you with it already!”

Harvey grinned. “I believe you.”

The policeman was in his early twenties, big, burly, strong, had never had his ass whipped by someone he was supposed to be
interrogating. He had been put on this American after the Yank had shown signs he was not the gentle type. The young cop had
swaggered into the room and tried to push Harvey around. The rest was history.

“Come over here,” Harvey said to him.

The Treasury cop warily obeyed, but ashamed also at being told what to do by a detainee.

Harvey grabbed him in a stranglehold and exerted pressure. The cop began to wheeze and croak for help. The door to the room
was thrown open and a tear-gas canister flung in. The door slammed shut before Harvey could get to it.

The canister hissed gas into the room while Harvey banged on the door and offered to go quietly.

The cop joined him and pleaded in Spanish. He got a reply from the other side of the door.

“They say this is my punishment for letting you get the better of me. Next time I am to be more careful.”

Harvey nodded. “You’ll be a real mean mother when you grow up, kid.”

The door was finally opened when both were nearly blinded and asphyxiated by the tear gas.

Harvey couldn’t see to get at them as they beat him with
truncheons. When he fell, they kicked him with their heavy boots as he lay on the cool tiled floor of the corridor.

Mike Campbell pressed the elevator button for the sixth floor. It went no higher.

“That’s strange,” he said to Cesar Ordonez, “I was sure they said he was on the seventh floor.”

When they got out on six, a guard with an Ingram submachine gun pointed to a steel door in a wall with a closed-circuit TV
camera above it. “They’ll open it when they see you.”

The electrically operated steel door swung inward after a few moments, and they climbed a flight of stairs to the seventh
floor.

“Mr. Murdoch will see you now,” a pretty receptionist told them with a New York Puerto Rican accent.

Andrew Murdoch was tall, handsome and fit, every inch a Wall Street WASP with some Gary Hart-style charm. His handshake was
firm, his palm dry, his teeth sparkling white. He was the first man Mike had seen wearing a business suit and tie in San Salvador.

“I’ve been on the phone to Dwight Poynings since you called me,” he said to Mike. “Understandably, he’s a bit upset that things
are not working out smoothly down here. From my short phone conversation with you earlier today, Mr. Campbell, I understand
that you wish information on your missing associates. I have made it clear to Poynings that information is all I can supply.
I don’t know what he told you I could do for you before you came to El Salvador. Certainly I had no knowledge he gave you
my name.”

“I understand,” Mike said. “You are simply the only American businessman he knows who is a resident here. My four missing
associates and I came here to investigate a major business opportunity for Poynings. I am not free to discuss the details,
as I am sure you will appreciate.”

Murdoch nodded. “Why not go to the American embassy?”

“That would be like phoning NBC. Poynings hates publicity.”

“How long have they been missing?”

“Two days.”

Murdoch shook his head. “That’s not good. All the same, I doubt they’d murder four Americans after all the fuss that has been
raised over previous American deaths. I think I can find out in a matter of hours where your friends are if they are still
alive. If they are not, it will be more difficult. Care for a martini, gentlemen?”

Obviously Andrew Murdoch’s move to the tropics had not changed his life-style in every detail. He expertly shook Bombay gin,
a sprinkle of vermouth and ice.

Cesar nodded in Murdoch’s direction and whispered to Mike, “CIA?”

Mike shrugged.

“I guess you fellows must think me a’ bit paranoid with the two armed guards at street level and another on the sixth floor,
plus the limited access up here,” Murdoch was saying. “By the way, there are even more security precautions which are less
evident. This is a dangerous country in which to be, but you wouldn’t believe how good it is for business. If Salvador’s central
bank would only free up more foreign exchange, there’d be no limit to entrepreneurial opportunity here.”

“That the only reason you’re here?” Cesar asked with a sarcastic edge to his voice.

It was lost on Murdoch. “You bet. Sure I got to hide out up here and I can’t put the name of my company on the door. I used
to have a place down the street a few years ago, a big ground-floor space with plate-glass windows, the company logo, a canopy,
the lot—till the damn guerrillas threw bombs inside it. The place was a total loss. Four of my staff were killed, but I escaped
with some cuts and bruises. Just lucky, I guess. Now I have to live behind high
walls, and armed guards, travel to here from my home in a garkmobile—”

“A what?” Mike asked.

“Garkmobile. After ‘oligarchy’—members of the ruling families usually ride in Jeep Cherokee vans with or plating and bulletproof
windows. They buy them in Miami and fit them out here with or at a cost of forty or fifty grand. It was a legit tax deduction
for me with the IRS. They questioned it, and you should have seen the look on that IRS inspector’s face—it was at their Church
Street office in New York, they haul me in every year, the bastards—you should have seen the look on his face when I claimed
submachine guns and bulletproof vests and everything as a business expense. Most people who use that kind of equipment in
their work don’t pay taxes!”

Lance was terrified they’d inject him with scopolamine or some other truth serum and find out he was the one who had wasted
the colonel, Turco and Adolfo. For that, he knew they’d dissect his nervous system, ganglion by ganglion, from his living
and feeling tissue with no anesthetic. Or worse.

He remembered the name of a book he had looked at by an Argentine who had run into trouble with the military dictators there,
Cell Without a Number, Prisoner Without a Name.
That was how he was beginning to feel already—after only two days.… And they hadn’t even beaten him yet! The electric cattle
prod had yet to come.

He was doing fine and sticking with his story of being an innocent tourist. Only now and then it would strike—the fear that
they would drug him and that he would admit he had killed three of them. Not
one
but
three
of the Treasury Police. He tried to imagine what they would do to him.

Mike Campbell had decided to abort the mission and do what he could to obtain the release of the four men, even if
it meant admitting why they had come to El Salvador. He was hanging on to his one last hope—Andrew Murdoch, a business friend
of Poynings’ who might or might not be a U.S. government agent of some kind. If Murdoch drew a blank, Mike would waste no
more time—and he realized he had wasted enough already, dragging his ass around the city searching for them every place he
could think of, trying not to arouse curiosity or draw attention to himself.

Mike jumped when the phone rang in his hotel room, and he was annoyed because Cesar grinned at his nervous reaction. Mercs
don’t expect their mission leader to start nervously when a phone rings!

It was Andrew Murdoch.

“Campbell, I don’t know whether to tell you to run for the hills or take a limo to the presidential palace. In any case, it’s
probably too late for you to do anything now. First, the good news. Your four men are all in Treasury Police custody here
in the city. All four are alive and unharmed.”

“They’re okay,” Mike told Cesar and began breathing easier. “Thanks, Murdoch, I owe you for this. What’s the bad news?”

“Poynings has gone off his rocker.”

“In what way?” Mike asked guardedly.

“A British TV unit shot film of his daughter taking part in a guerrilla raid on the town of Corralitos, northeast of here,
on the Rio Lempa. Apparently they flew their film or videotape overnight to London, showed it on TV there—Britain is five
hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time—so the East Coast U.S. stations had it in time for their evening news same day, which
is today.”

Mike glanced at his watch and said into the phone, “Boston is one hour ahead of San Salvador. It’s eight here, so this happened
two hours ago on the seven o’clock news?”

“Right.” Murdoch’s voice was crisp. “All three net—works carried it. Poynings was forced to allow his own
stations to carry scenes of his daughter running about with an automatic rifle. You can imagine the knot that tied him in.”
Murdoch’s voice trailed off as if he were stifling a laugh.

“What did he do?” Mike asked.

“He went on the air, claimed the Nicaraguans were trying to blackmail him, denounced the State Department and claimed that
he himself was a good American, that his daughter was having a nervous breakdown or was drugged. It was all highly emotional.”

“Did he say anything about us?” Mike asked, knowing it was useless now for him to try to conceal anything from Murdoch.

“No. Nothing. All this certainly answers some questions I had on my mind as to why you were here.” Murdoch paused to give
Mike a chance to say something. When he was greeted by silence, he went on. “My advice to you is to go see someone in the
military here, tell him what you are doing and ask his help. Now that this story is out about Poynings’ daughter, the military
should be pleased to help you if you promise to give them the credit for anything you manage to achieve.”

Nolan, Waller, Hardwick and Murphy were dropped off at their hotel by the Treasury Police and given an hour to shave, shower
and change their clothes. Mike and Cesar would accompany them to see the general. Mike summoned Andre Verdoux, seeing no point
in leaving him out of things now. Either they were in clover or being kicked out. There wasn’t much Mike could do about it,
one way or the other.

Mike learned for the first time why the four had been detained. He pumped their Treasury Police driver for more information
on the way to the general’s.

“Everyone calls him ‘the general,’ “ the Treasury man said. “Maybe his family and close friends call him by his first name,
Victor. You don’t hear people talking about
him by his last name like they do of others. He’s always ‘the general.’ And everyone knows which general is meant. If one
officer tells another ‘The general says he wants this,’ the second officer might wonder whether the general had really said
it or whether the first officer would dare put words in the general’s mouth he hadn’t said. He might wonder, but in the end
the second officer would do whatever it was the general was supposed to want rather than risk the consequences of crossing
him. That’s how powerful he is.”

“He’s an Escandell,” Mike said. “Isn’t that one of the oligarchical families?”

“It’s not one of the biggest or richest families, but its members are very powerful. The Escandells are not big landowners
like some of the old aristocrats. Their power is in the armed forces and security forces. So he is not a snob. The general
is a man of the people. We all like him, and he looks out for us.”