The Rockabye Contract, page 11
It was a perfect, cloudless afternoon, but the streets of Cap Hispaniola were almost deserted. Shops were closed, their windows protected by corrugated blinds, and no one was in the Parque Central, usually crowded at this hour. Few cars were on the avenidas, or even parked down the narrow side streets, and those I passed got away from the red bus as quickly as they could.
If our plans were moving on schedule, André Falaise and four of his local agents would already have hijacked the pierside warehouse where the crates of Joey-toys had been stacked. They had gone down there in an army six-wheeler truck during the siesta hour, and by now should be loading the crates of disks that impelled the toys.
In addition, the rebel columns should have converged on the capital, waiting at its outskirts until I called them in.
I stopped the red bus under the porte-cochère before the Zavala house, got out briskly, and banged with the fish-shaped knocker. A servant opened the door, and I said, “La señorita, por favor!” He nodded hurriedly, and stepped aside. When Hester came down the stairway and out, I bowed stiffly. She sailed on past me, and I was not in time to open the bus door for her.
Properly attired in virginal white, the tall girl sat staring straight ahead as I got behind the wheel and drove away. She wore no makeup at all. As we went humming by the deserted park, I offered her a cigarette but she shook her head stiffly, without looking at me. I nipped the end off a little cigar, fired up, and inhaled deeply.
“Well, Tiger Lady,” I said, “here we are again….”
She froze so tight that I thought she might go into shock. I patted her on the knee.
“Yes, it’s really me.”
Her stricken face turned; she shook her head in disbelief. “What are you doing? You’ll ruin everything! My God! And in Major Matar’s gaudy chariot….”
“The Major’s in the back, kid. He’s dead. Now loosen up a little, and listen to me. We’ve got to run a gauntlet in a few minutes.”
Hester started shaking, then crying, and I pulled over to the curb and stopped the bus. It was dangerous, because every second slipping by meant that much loss of the surprise element, but I had to do it. Lifting her head by the beautiful red hair, I slapped her face smartly until she was trying to duck away from me. Then I drove on.
“Keep your feet away from that carbine if I grab for it,” I said. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen because I don’t know. But if I say froggie, you better jump. Okay?”
“Yes.” She had straightened, and was wiping tears away with the tips of her index fingers. We swung onto the main plaza, around the flowered square and fountain in its center, and headed for the enormous ironwork gates of the Presidential Palace. The Palace was so white, across the perfect lawn, that it dazzled the eyes.
“Watch your feet!” I whispered as we approached the sentry box. Because this was our first gut-wrencher. If someone from Matar’s villa had escaped and spread the word, we were dead.
The gates swung open, the sentries snapped to attention, and I flipped them a casual salute as the red bus rolled inside the Palace grounds and around the crushed-shell driveway. With Hester sitting rigid beside me, we stopped under the archway at the side entrance. An officer was waiting there, and I stepped out of the bus, saluted him, and put him down and out with a solid right cross unloaded from the toe. Everything I owned was in the punch, and he fell forward like a poleaxed steer.
Turning, I flipped my front seat forward, clawed the burlap bags off Matar’s defrosting corpse, and manhandled it out onto the Palace steps. He was still wearing his chic scarlet peignoir, and looked quite odd sprawled there. Because of his broken neck, the big head was peeping coyly over his shoulder at me.
As I jumped back into the red bus, someone shouted inside the Palace at the far end of the shadowed marble corridor, and I gunned away, spraying the crushed white shell behind. I used the other gate for departure, and found that the Major’s fearful memory was still working, at least there. Whipping past the sentries, I turned off the Plaza into the first side street. When we had gone three blocks, I stopped the bus, grabbed the carbine and jumped out, motioning to Hester.
She followed me around the corner with that good early speed all virgins have, and we pounded on for another block. Went up a small alley and into the back door of the Cantina Diablo. It was empty, dark, and the metal shutters were drawn down over its front end. When I had bolted the back door, Hester sank down, panting, at one of the back tables, and I went behind the bar and found a bottle of Barbados rum for me and a double cognac for her.
As I had my drink, chasing it with sifón water, mortars began firing somewhere in the city. Prematurely. Their deadly chug-chug lasted for about ten minutes, and ceased abruptly.
“Goddammit!” I said between clenched teeth. “The dumb bastards will not wait!” Hester watched my hand tremble as I reached for the rum bottle again, but she did not speak. I listened, realizing that I was the biggest horse’s ass in the Caribbean. It wasn’t my revolution; these people had waited thirty years for the news.
Now that news was flying all over Cap Hispaniola: Johnny Matar is dead! The butcher’s body has been flung out on the Palace steps like dog’s meat. … Electrifying the impatient rebels, filtering down alleys and into darkened homes where people waited for a sign….
The sign had come. Johnny Matar is dead!
Hester said, “Can you tell me anything—” and I leaned over and kissed her.
“Not yet. Listen.”
Something had stopped outside in the deserted street, a big vehicle. Hester and I sat silent in the closed bar, waiting, until there was a dit-dah tap on the metal shutter. I got up and went to open the inset door, taking the carbine with me.
Falaise was standing outside in his dock-walloper’s clothes, a carbine canted under his right elbow. Across the street was the big six-wheeler army truck, its back end enclosed by an arching canvas tarpaulin.
“The cases of disks are there,” he said, “but we had to kill two guards.”
“No matter now,” I said. “I just dumped Matar, and the rocket’s about to go up. Come in and have a drink.”
“Thank you.” He stepped inside. “And perhaps a bottle of something for my boys in the truck. They did quite well.”
We went back to the table, and André bowed over Hester’s hand with a courtliness not many men can produce when they’re wearing rags and filthy cotton work gloves.
“So nice to see you again, mademoiselle,” he said, and the tall girl was instantly arch and regal. While they kept the amenities alive, I got André two bottles of Bisquit, and he had a quick one before we walked out of the bar and across to the truck.
Hester and I got in the front seat, and André was pulling away from the curb, handing one bottle of the cognac back over his shoulder to the four Hispaniolans in the back, when we heard small-arms fire. Very near. Not on our street, but close to it. With the truck gathering speed, André whipped left at the first corner, and that was a mistake.
A group of thirty or forty rebels was advancing toward us in warlike disarray, and they opened fire on the Army truck with rifles and pistols. André socked the gearshift into reverse so hard that I thought the transmission would tear out, but the truck went lurching backwards as shots chinked into its body. One of the headlights was shattered.
We backed around the corner wildly, and I reached for the carbine and spoke to André. “I’ll drop off here. Try another route to the airport, and I’ll contact you on the transceiver. …”
I tumbled out of the truck door and went scrambling into the nearest doorway on all fours. André had never taken his foot off the accelerator; the truck went whining back down the street in reverse to the next corner, then leaped forward and went out of sight.
I put the carbine on semiautomatic fire, and when the shouting rebels rounded the corner I squeezed off spaced shots that chopped brick dust and mortar out of the wall just over their heads. That reversed most of them, but one brave trio with more guts than brains tried to set up a light machine gun. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, aimed carefully, and blew the tripod out from the gun. Then sent the weapon spinning off its pedestal. Its operators broke and ran around the corner, following their comrades.
I waited with my finger sweating on the trigger, but they did not renew the assault. I was, after all, a lone officer, a stinger, and defending a doorway in the wrong direction, so they ran up the parallel street toward the Palace.
After waiting a few minutes, I got up and clucked when I saw that my headlong dive from the truck had ripped the knees out of my fancy officer’s pants. Staying close to the walls, I edged back down to the Cantina Diablo, went in through the inset door, and locked it behind me. I had left my potables in the truck, so I got another bottle of rum and one of sifon from the bar, and climbed up the narrow stairs and out the skylight above the bar.
I didn’t rush onto the roof because there is usually some well-protected patriot on another, nearby roof, who will shoot you dead. When I couldn’t spot any, I went in a crouching run to the northwest edge of the roof, my bottles, shoulder-slung carbine, and a belt-clipped walkie-talkie clanking. While I was arranging these objects, heavy firing broke out in the direction of the Plaza, and I eased up to look over the slanted tile edge of the roof.
The Presidential Palace was now ringed by tanks, parked just outside the high, spiked fence, and their guns were lowered to fire point-blank. Corpses littered the wide avenida around the flowered fountains, and as I watched, several groups of rebels tried to storm the iron gates and were scythed down by rifle fire from the Palace windows and machine-gun fire from its roof.
Whenever a massed group of rebels started forward, the tanks shuddered and their guns vomited smoke as they fired into the insurgents. The rebels did not seem to be under any effective control. So far, they hadn’t even moved the sentries out of the gatehouses; their crackling fire was contributing to the rebel toll.
Feeling a little sick, I eased myself flat on the roof, behind the rampart, and had a straight drink of rum from the bottle. Snapped the little metal-cased transceiver to send and called into it in Spanish. “Hello, Lobo, hello, Lobo! Can you read me, Lobo?”
The answer fell in like a ton of bricks. “Reading you loud and clear, from Lobo. Go ahead.”
“High-Point here,” I said angrily. “Are you trying to waste your men? You’re pouring them straight into the Palace tank fire. Where is the mortar barrage from Porto Three that was promised? Come in.”
The answering voice was high and strained, about to break. “We cannot get in from Porto Three, High-Point. That way is secured by government barricades; their chingada machine guns have chewed up most of Blanco Brigade.”
“Then for Christ’s sake pull out what’s left, and route them through Porto Five! I have a clear view of the Palace, and that way looks empty.”
“Roger from Lobo, will do,” said the voice, and snapped off the air. Somebody had been trained in the U.S.—or had seen a lot of movies….
In a few more minutes, I heard mortar shells and saw them dropping around the Palace, from Porto Five, which was the Calle Hernandez. I also contacted Gato Force, and thought I had them in proper tactical order when a ragged infantry platoon broke across the Plaza and went up like a bloody flower when grenades hurled from the Palace roof exploded among them. Those patriots not instantly dead tried to hitch or crawl away, and were picked off by rifle fire from the gatehouses.
Nausea put an iron clamp on my gut as I watched the bodies being lacerated, and I jerked away from the transceiver to vomit on the blistering tar roof. My teeth sickened me further; they were fouled by regurgitated rum. Grimly, sicker than any dog, I lifted the transceiver again and resumed calling the rebel forces.
Two columns composed of five stunted brigades were involved in the assault on Malo’s Palace. And they seemed determined to destroy themselves, to no purpose, before the issue could be decided. I kept observing and correcting their assault, and trying to coordinate their mortar barrages. In an hour, it seemed that I had the five brigades roughly coordinated. But only roughly. Most of the tanks ringing the blazing white Palace were still operational, slewing around as they fired point-blank.
I called the airport without bothering about code names. “Hello, André?” I asked hoarsely. “Can you read me?”
Nothing happened. The afternoon somnolence was still being punctuated by the blasting tanks and the lessening mortar explosions. The open carrier wave hummed in my ear, and I shook the compact transceiver impatiently, aware that I smelled like a gut wagon.
“Hello, André!” I repeated. “This is High-Point. If you read me, please come in. High-Point to André!”
More silence. I unbuttoned my fine Hispaniolan colonel’s tunic; sweat was pouring off my face and neck, and drenching my chest. Then his low amused voice flowered in my ear.
“Yes, Joe,” said André. “We’re in the hangar, and loading the disks into what must be the most ancient Apache in the world. But even with six of us working, you know, it takes a little time to flip all these switches.”
“Right,” I said, lying on my back and staring up into the cloudless blue sky. “Be as quick as you can, my friend. These rebels are not organized; they are getting slaughtered. And it’s principally my fault that they surfaced.”
“I understand. We’re nearly through. Mademoiselle Hester will be my bombardier….” He broke off, and I heard fragments of excited talk around him, on the carrier wave. Then he came back on, his voice firm. “We’re ready to taxi now, mon ami.”
“One pass, André,” I said hoarsely, “then for God’s sake, go on to one of the small interior airports. Get yourself and Hester out of sight.”
“Roger and gone,” answered the Frenchman. His voice sounded almost lighthearted as he clicked off. Perhaps that was the secret. The big catastrophe, or at least the possibility of it, was dead ahead. The excitement stronger than any opiate. Because Generalissimo Malo’s Palace was ringed by the strongest concentration of antiaircraft batteries in Latin America, and André was taking off against them in a decrepit little monoplane….
I lay listening, staring at the sky. The airport was only a few miles from town. The ring of tanks around the Palace was still blowing up foolhardy rebels who tried to rush the gates, and the lighter fire from the roof and gatehouses continued. A heavier cadence opened up, shaking the ground, as the antiaircraft batteries started firing. I heaved up and peered over the rampart again.
Seven of the government tanks were burning, and a steady pressure of mortar and machine-gun fire seemed to be coming from the five land-side avenidas and calles. The white Palace was pocked with gaping holes, but a steady, raking fire continued from its windows and roof. The battle looked like a standoff, with both sides grievously hurt and General Malo clinging to his headquarters.
If that continued to be true, Malo could get reserve troops in from the provinces before long, and the revolution would be defeated. The whole thing swung on André’s flight.
I contacted both Lobo and Gato Forces, and was told that they could hold but not attack. Two of the brigade headquarters would not even answer my call, and all my cursings and pleadings would not budge those who answered High-Point. From their dug-in positions, nursing their wounds, looking at their own dead, the commanders said, “We have lost half our forces. No reason to get more killed. The tyrant cannot escape us now….”
The sky over Cap Hispaniola was beginning to be pocked by dark puffs of smoke, exploding at up to 30,000 feet, and I knew the little Apache had been sighted approaching the city. It was an awesome waste of firepower; antiaircraft shells were dirtying up the serene tropic sky with a jarring, pumping barrage. To the southeast, like a gnat that had blundered into Purgatory, Andre’s plane was going directly toward the gleaming Palace. As it hummed over, not a hundred feet above the roof, the machine guns stationed there were stuttering fire at it. I could almost see André smiling faintly as the roof gunners frantically changed traverse.
The little plane zoomed over the Palace and showered down an irregular stream of silvered pellets. Wings tilting in wild aerobatics, it made its first pass, banked over the blue sea beyond the harbor, and came diving back like an annoying wasp. That gave the antiaircraft guns on the beaches a shot at it, and their thunder joined the general cacaphony. The rooftop was shaking below me, and I grabbed the transceiver and shouted at André to clear the area.
He was not listening. When the little plane came racking and twisting over the Palace roof again, it was so low that several of the machine gunners below deserted their guns, falling flat. Another stream of silver pellets fell from the plane, and André hauled her up sharply and snap-rolled to the west. Once he was hit; the plane checked and faltered, but leveled out again. And all around him, the tremendous ring of antiaircraft batteries kept hammering away in brazen fury, trying to hit the elusive wasp.
My lungs hurt, and I realized that I had been shouting instructions at André, without benefit of the transceiver. It seemed that the Frenchman, incredibly, was going to get the little plane out alive. Just as I was relaxing, watching him diminish to the west, a direct hit took his right wing off and the plane went into a flat spin. Plunged down, whirling in evermore erratic arcs until it plummeted out of sight.
I eased back down on the cantina roof, and lay there aching. Thinking that what I did was a lousy frigging way to make a living….
Having made their kill, the ring of antiaircraft batteries fell silent. I was lighting a little cigar without relish when I heard a new kind of explosion. Then another, and another. Heaving myself up to the roof rampart again, I saw the Malo era come to an end.
From the narrow streets leading to the Plaza and its flowered fountains, a stream of the Joey-toys was moving on the white Palace. They came rolling along steadily, jostling each other. Not knowing traffic regulations, they rolled over the flower beds and around the equestrian statue of Malo, and when they butted into the tanks and fences, there were explosions that left nothing but twisted and smoking wreckage.
