The area beyond the donkey engine was slab rock; it didn’t hold tracks. The men fanned out, a few into the jungle, two more going forward along the rim. One man began to descend the narrow switch-backing footpath that led to the camp at the bottom of the cliff.
She could see him coming down the cliff and she could see the angular one who squatted just inside the mouth of the big cave with a rifle in both hands; she saw them from her hiding place back in the sodden trees and she wondered if she had left tracks that the one on the path would find when he got to the bottom.
She saw two more men up top, fitful glimpses of them as they made their way along the rim above the cave. And there’d been voices—even more of them above her somewhere.
Madness, she thought. Sheer utter madness: I belong in a rubber room. Stupid lunacy. But then if you figure to get killed anyway what’s the point of beating around the bush?
She felt momentarily proud of herself for that thought because it sounded like something of Harry’s.
She went dizzy for a moment but she didn’t faint; she only stumbled a bit and reached for a tree trunk for support. Its surface was slimy and repulsive to her touch. She took the disposable plastic cigarette lighter out of her pocket. Harry: I don’t care if you don’t smoke. It’s a survival weapon: Always carry fire with you.
The rags she’d torn from her blouse and stuffed into the necks of the bottles were soaked with rain and she didn’t know whether that would destroy their capillary ability to soak up gasoline from the bottles. She’d wrung them out as dry as she could but what if they refused to catch fire? In this weather it was possible to imagine that nothing would burn.
She put the lighter back in her pocket. It wasn’t time for it yet. Then she gingerly shifted two of the bottles to her left hand, winced when she scraped a raw wound, and crept to the next tree. Her boots sank ankle-deep into the mud. She was in the jungle now and she couldn’t see out past the dark thickness of trees and bamboo and lush creeping things; that man on the cliff must be halfway to the bottom by now and she didn’t have much time at all.
Madness, she thought again.
And moved toward the huts.
See, ducks, the thing is, guerrilla warfare’s got nothing to do with the kind of thing they teach at Sandhurst and West Point. That’s what the American Army never learned in Nam. You want to stay alive, you learn to think like a magician—the kind you see doing tricks with scarves and coins and cards in cheap dives in Brighton and Sausalito. You wave the right hand around to get everybody’s attention and in the meantime behind your back your left hand’s pulling the pin on the grenade and they don’t even see it when you roll it under their table. Simple misdirection—diversion’s the whole thing, you get their attention by making a big noise to the right and then you sneak up on ’em from the left.
All she could do, really, was provide Harry with his diversion.
She’d made it as far as the first Jeep and she was crouched beside it peering up through the mud-stained windshield: Four or five men were coalescing at the top of the cliff and starting down the narrow shelving path; the man who’d started earlier was down out of sight now but when she turned her head she could still see the man in the cave, standing up now, watching the jungle, rifle held ready across his chest.
She dropped a bit lower and looked across the seats toward the big hut. She’d seen Harry go inside that one; she had to assume he was still in there, even though she’d been out of sight of it.
She set the three bottles on the muddy clay by her feet and dug the plastic lighter out of her pocket.
Crobey was playing the ten of clubs on the jack of hearts when concussion from the blast knocked him off his chair and drove the woven-bamboo door into the room like a projectile. It caromed against the table, knocking it down across him and spilling cards all over him.
The deafening racket echoed inside the hut and he had quickly-glimpsed impressions of everybody in action—Vargas peeling himself off the radio and groping for his Kalashnikov; Emil ducking, arms over his head, then straightening and searching wildly for a weapon; Julio Rodriguez wheeling toward the door lifting his Uzzi; Cielo scowling in that baffled I-knew-it way of his, lifting the revolver in his hand as if he considered it a futile gesture demanded by protocol.
Crobey’s ears were still ringing when his mind focused on one object and he rolled toward it—the knapsack they’d taken off him when they’d captured him. It lay open beyond the radio, its contents exposed. Vargas was tramping toward the doorway through which the explosion had burst; flames were climbing both sides of the doorframe now, erupting very fast, and the Cubans began to shoot—spraying ammunition blindly through the fire and smoke. Emil was yelling at the top of his voice and for a moment none of them was looking at Crobey and he pounced on the knapsack. He did all the rest of it in a continuous fluid motion: Plucked a gas grenade from the open bag, jerked the pin out, slid it across the floor toward the Cubans, got his good leg under him, and launched himself back into the shadows behind the bulk of the radio. There was a back door in that dark wall—you never built a military hut without a back way out—but it was bolted on the inside and he wasted precious time trying to find the bolt in the bad light. Gas exploded through the room and he began to choke on it, tears streaming, but then he had the damned thing open and he plunged outside, fell three feet into the mud and rolled fast.
He heard them coughing in there and then the second explosion knocked him about and something stung his cheek, laying it open—he felt the sudden warmth of spouting blood before the pain hit. A great blaze of fire erupted at the far corner of the hut and Crobey scrambled to his feet and wheeled to run for it. Then he heard Carole:
“Harry. Over here!”
He heard himself mutter: “Good grief.” Then he was running toward the Jeep, bent over, weaving from side to side. Bullets were still flying through the flames from inside the hut but that dwindled fast—the gas would be disabling all of them now but then the shooting picked up again and he realized it was coming from elsewhere. A string of bullets from an automatic weapon sewed a swift stitch along the mud in front of him, little geysers spouting, and he threw himself flat, skidding in the muck, sliding behind the Jeep and aware that there were men on the cliff shooting down through the flames.
She stared at him, not moving, and he took the blazing Molotov cocktail from her hand and heaved it mightily. It exploded in the air and rained shards of blazing petrol over the camp. Bits of gravel and shattered glass banged against the Jeep and he realized that was what had cut his cheek—a sliver of glass from the previous bomb. He gripped her hard, by the wrist, yanking her away. “Run for it!” And hurled her into the trees ahead of him.
She tumbled into a rotting moist pool that stank of compost; she flailed weakly in protest when Harry hauled her out of it.
His face was ghastly—a long ragged slit below the cheekbone, blood matted everywhere. But a smile came into his eyes. Feeling nearly burst her throat.
“Hello ducks.”
“Harry—”
“Come on, keep moving, keep moving.”
He propelled her through the morass. She nearly left a boot behind in it. He was half carrying her—bullying her along: “Get your goddamned ass in gear, woman.”
Smashing through twigs, stumbling against trees. He reached for a hanging vine and hauled them both up over a tangle of roots. Then the way was blocked by a stand of bamboo, its trunks as thick as drain pipes—a solid wall of it, looming into the sky. Harry pushed her to the left and she resisted. “Not that way. The cliff—we’ll be trapped.”
“Only place to go now, ducks.”
“But—”
“Shut up. Come on.” He gave her a violent heave and she lurched wildly, spinning her arms; he caught her by the elbow and then they were running, Harry gasping in her ear: “Have you got a gun or anything?”