The Viper Squad (8 page)

Poynings looked aghast. “Sally would never do that to me.”

This was enough to confirm in Dudley’s mind that Sally very likely would.

The executive secretary buzzed. “Call for Mr. Dudley.”

He was on the phone for a time, and Dwight moved politely out of earshot. If his old friend Harrison Dudley could sit there
and threaten him with income-tax audits and the loss of his broadcast licenses, it was imperative he take action on this mess
himself. What could the girl be doing down there? He understood about the boy’s wanting to make films and that. But what was
she doing now?

This Chips Stadnick person who was due at three would be a start. Certainly Stadnick was his only contact in this rather shady
area, although he had never met him.

Dwight looked at Harrison impatiently. They had nothing more to talk about. If at all possible—meaning that if it did not
interfere with Harrison’s own interests—he would look out for Dwight. That did not need to be stated between them. What friends
are for. Dwight wished the fellow would get off the phone and go.

Harrison finally replaced the receiver and stood. “Have to be off. You won’t forget you’ve all sorts of people looking over
your shoulder, will you, Dwight? By the way, there was a little news item that might interest your TV people. I’ll tell you,
but don’t reveal your source. Seems that Russian scientist who died at Harvard earlier today didn’t have a heart attack. He
was killed with poison, perhaps with a dart from a blowgun. In Cambridge, of all places. You can’t say you weren’t the first
to get that news from us.”

As Dwight walked his old friend to the elevator, he saw what looked like a retired pro-football player with a flat
face and a broken nose sitting in the reception area. He had no doubt that would prove to be Chips Stadnick.

When Dwight came back, he ushered Stadnick into his office before him, closed the door after him and went alone to the conference
room to phone his news team with the information Dudley had given him on this Russian’s death. They loved things like poison
darts and blowguns.

“How are things going?” Dwight asked cheerfully when he came back to his office.

“I’m afraid I lost him, sir,” Stadnick said.

“Who?”

“The subject I was assigned, sir. The man who tried to kill your reporter last Tuesday. But I’ll get him for sure next week.”

“Good. Good.”

Dwight had other things on his mind. He did not associate the Russian’s death with the man they had under investigation, and
Stadnick did not mention he had lost his quarry in Cambridge.

“He’s a tough nut to crack,” Chips said to break the silence that had developed. “But we got a real lead on him now for the
first time. One of your reporters remembered seeing him in old footage taken in Thailand after those mercenaries grabbed the
Vanderhoven grandson in Vietnam.”

“He was one of them?” Dwight asked with interest. “Who was that man they said was commander of the group? A Green Beret they
called ‘Mad Mike,’ wasn’t it?”

“Right, sir. Mike Campbell. If you ask me, he’s probably some kind of wacko maniac—”

“But he does get results.”

“Yes, sir. So I hen.”

“That’s what’s important, Mr. Stadnick.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll do better this Tuesday.”

“I want you to leave tomorrow for El Salvador.”

Stadnick recoiled as if hit. “Oh, no. Not me.”

“I’m going to tell you something which I want kept very quiet. But first we’ll discuss economics. W. Stadnick,
I know you’ve heard the phrase ‘Money is no object.’ That condition applies here. Succeed or fail, you will consider—ably
enrich yourself by going to El Salvador for me tomorrow.”

Dwight almost smiled at the look of greed on Stadnick’s broken face. This man would be a good start. If he could find Sally
without undue publicity, Dwight would not have to hide his face from his political friends. Most of all, he would not have
to tell his wife their daughter was missing and have to live through her emotional hysteria. He could feel he was getting
events back under control. There were so many other things Sally could have done. Why this?

Mike Campbell joined Andre Verdoux on a grassy bank some distance outside an alpine village after passing around bottles of
beer and wine to the rest of the company. They had just climbed from the village, laden with shopping bags of bottles. Since
Swiss soldiers on maneuvers were forbidden to enter stores to purchase things for themselves, the presence of two foreign
observers provided them with a convenient loophole in these regulations.

Mike had phoned Tina in Arizona while they were in the village. He said to Andre, “I think she’s finally begun to believe
I really am in Switzerland with you, like I told her. She knows I’d never contact her during a real mission.”

“She sounds like a fine woman,” Andre said. “I notice you take care that I never meet her.”

Mike smiled. “Not because I’m afraid she would fall for your Gallic charm, Andre. It’s just that I think she’ll be safer if
she knows nothing—absolutely nothing—about my mercenary activities, including who else is involved in them.”

“I agree with you. Try some of this—it’s not at all bad, for a Swiss wine. Not up to our French standards, of course, but
palatable.”

They washed down cheese, smoked sausage, nuts and Swiss chocolate with two bottles of tart white wine and
looked at the jagged snow-capped peaks all around them. A warm breeze blew on them from the direction of Italy.

This pastoral serenity was suddenly shattered by a jet fighter that swooped down upon them without warning from behind a rock
face, bent the tall grass about them with its wind as it screamed overhead, crawled like a lizard up a mountain face and disappeared
over the top.

The soldiers laughed and one shouted, “I bet the top brass will let us know they have aerial photos of us drinking beer and
wine on a hillside while we’re meant to be defending our country.”

This drew several toasts of an obscene nature to the top brass and more laughter.

Andre said, “That man is not exaggerating when he says they will have photos. There’s a story of a Swiss air show at which
the American, Russian and Chinese military attaches, along with those of twenty other nations, were settling themselves in
the grandstand for the show when a Mirage came in the back door, almost scraped the hats off the men in the grandstand and
did a backflip over a mountain. When the show ended, each attache was presented with an aerial photo of himself looking up
with a startled expression.”

Mike laughed. “You forgot to mention, Andre, that Mirages are French-built.”

“I did? We French are so modest.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“In the late fifties, the French army had a group of us training with Mirages in the Charente,” Andre said. “The countryside
there, all around the town of Cognac, is gently rolling hills with a lot of vineyards. The planes would fly just above the
ground, moving up and down with its contours, at incredible speeds. Sometimes the Mirages had to search for us while we advanced
from one point to another, both points known to the pilots. Some of those fliers could almost cut bunches of grapes off the
vines with a wingtip. They dropped canisters of dye on us and took
photos. At other times the planes worked with us against a designated target or a moving enemy. They moved too fast to be
of much use for that—helicopters were better.”

“I think the Russians would take a bigger hammering here in Switzerland than they are taking in Afghanistan,” Mike said, and
added, “if they were dumb enough to try conventional warfare in these mountains.”

It was time for their company to move on. As they passed over a bridge that took the only road over a ravine, Andre and Mike
looked over the side till they found the unobtrusive metal door in its ferroconcrete side. They knew that inside that locked
steel door explosives had already been set in place to blow up the bridge. Everything was ready to go. And some local men
back in the village they had just passed through had the keys and necessary instructions.

It was said that every key bridge, tunnel and pass in Switzerland was similarly mined and ready to blow on short notice. The
Swiss could make their mountains impassible in a couple of hours.

The Russians would almost certainly choose some easier way around them, as had the Germans in World War B.

Mike was glad he had come. He realized what Andre had wanted him to see—a well-armed and well-prepared populace determined
to fight, if they had to, for their freedom and way of life. Not a bunch of freeloaders hoping that politicians would keep
their vague promises to them.

Rosita insisted on driving. “Please, Chips, let me. I am very good driver.”

The hired car was insured, so Stadnick did not care how good she was. He gave her the keys. He had picked her up the previous
night in a hotel cocktail lounge and paid her to spend the night with him. Besides being pretty and being a good lay, she
spoke reasonable English and knew
her way around. She gave him what sounded to be a reasonable three-day rate.

She wasn’t bad as a driver when she remembered to keep her eyes on the road. They were leaving the city of San Salvador, passing
through its outer ring of shanties, hovels and lean-tos.

“Are these the people who have come in from the rural areas to escape the violence?” he asked, remembering something he had
seen on TV that, so far as he could recall, had been about El Salvador.

“Yes,” Rosita said, waving a hand. “They come for work, but there’s so little work for anybody. These people are not as poor
as others.”

Chips looked at the miserable conditions about him and wondered what being really poor here must look like. Odd-shaped pieces
of lumber leaning against each other like houses built of playing cards, sheets of plastic, scrap metal, running children,
bony dogs, scorching sun.

“Look down there,” he said. “They’re living in a dried-up river gulley.”

“That’s what we call
barranca.”

“Doesn’t it flood them out?” he asked.

“Sometimes, in the rainy season.”

“You grew up in a place like this?”

“Yes, it was a nice place, iot of friendly people,” she said. Then she smiled and touched his knee, taking her eyes off the
road to look at him. “I prefer living in luxury hotel.”

He pointed out that she was veering left into oncoming traffic.

A minute later she cut off a guy in a big car, who blew his horn furiously, then raced after and overtook them. When the driver
saw it was a pretty girl who had cut him off, his anger changed to laughter and the two cars had a friendly race, side by
side, that made Stadnick’s hair stand on end.

Rosita laughed and slowed down. “You come all this
way to El Salvador, Chips, and it is not the guerrillas who kill you, it is a woman driver.”

After an hour, they pulled into the small town’s dusty square.

“It’s the one with the Coca-Cola sign.” He pointed, checking once again the typed instructions that had been ready for him
at the American embassy.

Inside the cinder-block hut, the heavyset man behind the counter politely bade them good day.

Rosita told him in Spanish what Chips had told her to say. “This norteamericano works for the blond girl’s father, the one
you drove out to the guerrillas. We know it was you who took her. The National Police reported it to the American embassy.
The embassy has insisted that you be allowed to remain free.”

“Nobody here wants to harm me. The soldiers are my friends.”

“It seems to me you’re playing a dangerous game,” Rosita commented.

“And you?” he challenged.

She laughed. “I do it for money. Here is the name and hotel in San Salvador of my norteamericano. He says the rebels should
contact him there so they can talk.”

“That will cost him a hundred Yanqui dollars.”

Rosita raised her eyebrows in appreciation and said to Chips in English, “He say he want one hundred Yanqui dollar.”

“A hundred dollars!” Chips rooted in his pocket. “Here, give him this twenty.”

The shopkeeper held up a hand and shook his head. “Fifty,” Chips offered.

“Cincuenta,” Rosita translated.

“Ciento,” the man responded.

Rosita began in English, “He say—”

“I know, I know.” Chips peeled off another four twenties from a wad, added them to the fifth bill and handed them to the man.

He sensed Rosita’s eyes following the thick wad of bills from which he had peeled the five twenties, and he allowed it to
float under her nose a moment to arouse her desires.

Seven members of the Clara Elizabeth Ramirez Metropolitan Commando sat on wood boxes beneath the banana—leaf thatch of a shack
in a barranca near the San Salvador football stadium. They were secure here with the poor as their watchdogs. A lone policeman
or soldier would meet a bullet or steel blade within minutes in this barranca, and the arrival of an armed force would raise
an alarm a mile around them. And this was not a place where strangers chose to wander and spy. Not if they wanted to live
to see another day.

“We have to wait for Paulo for orders on what to do,” an intense young man argued. “He knows the whole story. We don’t.”

There was much grumbling about this.

“These Cubans think they are better than us,” another said. “We always have to wait for Paulo or one of the other Cubans to
tell us what to do. I say we take action for ourselves.”

“What action do we take? No one in El Salvador knows what’s going on, rightist or leftist. At least the Cubans and Nicaraguans
have outside contacts and access to hard information.”

“They feed us what they want us to believe,” the first shot back, “and leave out anything that doesn’t suit their purposes.
You ask what we should do. I’ll tell you. Let’s find out what this Chips Stadnick has to say. What harm can that do?”

“Sounds reasonable,” another concurred.

“We’ll wait for Paulo because we’re under orders to wait for him. I don’t like Paulo Esteban any more than you do, but as
members of this commando we obey orders, not give them.”